Want Higher rankings?

Exclude your content.

[glengara]

For a well known three letter acronym there are 1,620,000 results, 1,490,000 in English.
That's less than 10% non English pages, yet of the top 20 results, 9 are Japanese pages, close to 50%.

IMO, there's two possibilities, G is just picking up the acronym from these pages and ignoring the Japanese characters, or it is ignoring the on-page factors altogether and ranking them solely on off-page criteria.
I suspect the latter, and without wishing to denigrate our Japanese colleagues abilities, I doubt we would see quite so many Japanese pages if content was included in the equation.

There's also the example of a site that excluded Gbot just before Florida, all that remained for G to work with were the incoming links and link text.
Site has remained rock solid in the SERPs throughout the debacle.

If you've already got lots of links, seems like content can be more of a liability than an asset these days ;-)

[rise2it]

Hmmm.....off to translate my site into Japanese.

[plasma]

There's also the example of a site that excluded Gbot just before Florida, all that remained for G to work with were the incoming links and link text.
Site has remained rock solid in the SERPs throughout the debacle.

A competitor of mine on #1 with his doorway pages (the one with the NOSCRIPT) never shows fresh dates.
Coincidence?

[LaBonne]

I recently did some in-depth research on the top-twenty listings for my two word keyword phrase. Two out of the top twenty had PR 4, low to almost no content, and few backlinks. What they did have was the keyword phrase at the very beginning of the title, meta-description, and meta-keywords - and pretty much nothing else. Basically "keyword phrase is on this page".

No competing keywords seems to have equaled these pages with PR 5's, many backlinks, and pages with a 1000 words of content. Blech! It points to "if there is no/little content, then rank by meta tags relevancy".