signor_john - 2:41 pm on Sep 4, 2009 (gmt 0)

the point isn't whether or not keyword stuffing is the reason they are number one. The fact is that it should count against them and obviously doesn't. ....yes they are good sites, i just read the wenmaster tools again, and its this point i think is relevant.

If they're "good sites," it's possible that there are enough mitigating factors to outweigh the keyword stuffing. A site that passes the sniff test in other respects may be viewed more charitably than, say, a made-for-AdSense scraper site or or thin-affiliate site with 100,000 computer-generated pages and 10,000 reciprocal links from sites of no intrinsic value. Why? Because in "grey area" situations (such as the number of times a keyword is used on a page) it makes sense to look at the overall picture. That's what a human reviewer would do, and if a search engine's alogrithm can replicate that kind of judgment through the use of different measurement factors and statistical probability, then good for the search engine.