martinibuster - 3:59 pm on Aug 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

Usually taken from elsewhere, by someone who doesn't personally know what they are writing about...

No, no, no. That's incorrect. That might be true for sites like eHow or Wikipedia but that is not true for About.com. About.com is authoritative, head and shoulders more authoritative than Wikipedia. On About.com you can verify the credentials of the authors. About.com content is solid. I would rather see that in SERPs instead of Google's crutch, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not authoritative.

Take a moment to visit the site. About.com lists the authors/guides and their qualifications. Most if not all the contributors there are qualified to write on the topics they curate. Here's the bio for the web design and marketing guide [webdesign.about.com]:

Jennifer Kyrnin has been a professional web developer and has been assisting others to learn web Design, HTML, CSS, and XML since 1995... Jennifer has maintained sites of over 5000 pages on a large corporate websites, smaller small business websites, and tiny personal web pages and blogs, as well as several intranet and extranet sites. She has also worked as a contract Web designer on numerous sites. She has worked with nearly every web technology including XML, CMS, HTML, PHP, Perl, C, JavaScript, Ruby, and Java. Jennifer has written three books about the Internet, including two on web design and HTML. Her most recent book is about building HTML5 web applications for mobile devices.