To other legitimate SEOs... rant... Google uselessness

If you are being outranked by expired domains; sites that suck etc, then you have some serious SEO problems with your site.

A DA of 16 doesn't mean you are doing anything "right". DA is not used by Google to rank your pages. It's just a third party metric put out by Moz. It can be used to compare one page to another, but even then it is not a solid enough metric to base anything on in a vacuum.

As far as your page though, what are you doing to rank it? Just creating "good" content is not enough.

Also, I would be curious to see the pages outranking you. I cannot count how many times I have seen complaints like this and the OP's own site is nothing that special either. We often hold a bias towards things we have created when comparing them to competitors.

What is your URL? How do we know what you're doing is "right" for SEO?

It's most likely your competitor is doing a better thing than you.

By the way, what do you mean by been legiti?
I have had that too many times only for me to find out that we are all "blackout", I prefer to use that word.

In this case you might be failing to keep up the competition. Keep calm and do research on this. Hope you will find the solution.

You're not providing the searcher with what they want to find, assuming you have the right content; you've created the content that has what they want to find.

The next step is providing it to them (i.e., market it - SEO, ads, etc.)

Unnatural links are the most links that people(me) get. Nothing wrong with it. You kid yourself with what you provide as being "so much better."

You never know what your comp is really doing, what people want, what google gives. Sometimes we get into a niche or keyword that makes no sense, and think all sorts of things about google. The people have spoken. Real people doing real searches from real devices like google.

If that is what is kicking your butt, then 2 things are going on:
1) The niche is so lousy, you get lousy results.
2) You are over thinking, over-doing, over-seo-ing, following someone's checklist, and swearing that YOU should be #1...when in fact you are barking up the wrong trees.

How about stopping now? If you have a real business, google is NEVER a cause of your success or failure. It's entirely up to you. I see things like godaddy, travago, travelocity, zillow, various meds, diapers, samsung, and anything you can think of....advertise on on TV. And people wonder why they do this when they are #1 online....

Nothing is blackhat. It either works, or it doesn't.

Sometimes you can do everything right, and never get there. Again, you can either do it yourself,or try another website.

DA does not tell you anything. The fact that you even mention it, is a tip off to what and who you are following.

Paul

Buy the expired domains.

Now you rank higher.

man your site must really suck.....

It was just a movie.

just because you build what you consider a great site doesn't mean anyone has to come or Google has to rank it.

Cry for Googlexit!

If those sites are ranking for longer time in SERPS then they are actually providing what the reader wants to know.

Welcome to the club. well nice rant, but G does not care about "worthless sites"
They ONLY care about selling more small ads. Thats what they do business wise, the rest is an unpaid extra job, and nobody cares about extra work that does not get paid.

They do it to keep the image to be a "search engine" alive. Are they a search engine? Not really, they let you search the ads they receive the most money for.

Everything else is pure fiction.