Anyone have clues on why subdomain blogs rule?

[Marcia]

Trust me that I'm not a grumbling competitor, for a particular search I'm #1 and #2 (indented) and #3 is actually way better than my site and quite honestly would be #1 by human evaluation standards - mine, anyway.

But the rest, the following 7 out of the top 10 for that search, are blogs hosted on 3rd party subdomains that you can tell are very specifically created not for users (like the Search Engine Good Books tell us), but to rank at MSN.

Anyone have any ideas they'd like to share on what factors are helping those web pages to rank?

[Shurik]

Maybe thousands of keyword anchored links from other blogs :)