The ehow / hubpages pages are, not surprisingly, thinner than mine, contain inaccuracies, and cite my page as a reference.
And the link citations are always nofollowed. ;)
Hard to say if these results will stick. One possibility is that Google is testing a different mixture of searcher intents in the top ten, and Google might feel that eHow is the best for one type of page that many people want... not necessarily "better" than yours, but probably more popular. They may, eg, see the ehow page as a quick read for the superficial reader... and perhaps this is a
type of page that Google is now measuring against others.
I doubt that Google can judge accuracy... I'm afraid they need to leave that to the judgement of the users over time.
It may also be that Google has rolled back the scraper update from way back, perhaps to re-calibrate. In this regard, a page of mine that I know is original came back a few weeks ago after having been scraped to death... more or less disappearing for almost two years. It used to rank for a single-word term... now ranks for phrases that include the single word... and I've come to understand the variety of reasons why Google is preferring what it's preferring.
The new rankings do make more sense if you make different assumptions about what people are looking for than I did when I wrote the page... and at least the page is no longer being filtered because of its similarity to so many scrapers.
One big concern I have, btw, with regard to these thin eHow pages ranking again, is that their resurgence might indicate that we're in a popularity contest among "well-dressed" sites, and old jeans and overalls may be out for a while. I know this definitely not true for all types of queries/answers, as I still see a bunch of Times Roman, but it might be true for the popularized quick-info kind of page that eHow represents.
I should say, btw, that I've found that eHow articles are not always bad. There's a lot to be said for good layout and semi-decent editing, even when mixed with pablum.
