good ranking without content?

[trailrider]

Hi
I’m new here, first post ever. And I rather ride my horses than surf the Internet. Anyway,I have 2 pages I take care of( www.antilco.com and www.languagepucon.com), both create very little traffic, maybe due to the items they deal with , but as a lot of the visitors become clients I’m happy. Thanks to all the information I found in this forum the pages rank good on Google and Yahoo on their key phrases, especially in German. I always try to give good content, build the page rather for visitors than bots - stick to what I learned here.
My following question is just for curiosity: checking my results in google I always find two pages ranking very well with similar search phrases as me: http://www.escuelabellavista.cl and http://www.landhaus-chile.com. Both with no or little content on the index page they are ranking for, the second with keyword stuffing in the head, how do they manage to rank well?
Anyone out there who can explain this to me?

Saludos desde Pucon
Mathias

[wprules]

Sites often get ranked highly for a while even they don't have quality, original content. But I've read that search engine bots are becoming more sophisticated and, a few years down the line, only the highest quality sites will be ranked highly.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by wprules

Sites often get ranked highly for a while even they don't have quality, original content. But I've read that search engine bots are becoming more sophisticated and, a few years down the line, only the highest quality sites will be ranked highly.

What do you mean with high quality web sites?

[EArmand]

One of the biggest factors in SE algorithms today is the website's link popularity. By link popularity, I am addressing specifically inbound only text links, not reciprocal or 3 way links.

With this said, it is possible to rank high without a lot of content as long as the site has plenty of inbound, quality text links from reputable sources.

Lastly, both of these sites are providing a service that is local to the area, right? Local search results are very easy to control requiring less inbound links than it would if you were trying to rank high for world wide search terms.

You should be able to rank higher than these 2 sites if your site has more content than they do and if your site gets more inbound links than they have, and they don't have that many, so it shouldn't be too hard.