londrum - 10:00 am on Apr 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

Then how do you explain every single site in the winners having ads clearly labeled as "ads" (or they have no ads in their content at all) and nearly every single site in the losers does not have "ads" labeled as ads?

but how can you use that as a pointer to the quality of a site? if google are ranking sites based on whether the word "ads" appears above the ads then their algo is completely screwed.

that is a good example of how i think people are clutching at straws

If you think google can detect which content is truly useful for a reader then you are giving google way too much credit.

of course they can. that is old school search engine stuff. they work it out by a variety of methods including the amount of backlinks it gets, how much time a user spends reading it, what the bounce out rate is, how many return visits it gets...
but whether an ad appears above it is not one of them