Are search quality reviewers picking the wrong winner?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Alistair Lattimore: I agree with Dani, there are a lot of other great resources that deserve to rank for a given query.
  
  Google try and provide diversity in the search results but in certain verticals, there just isn't enough relevant competition for Google to reasonably show alternatives and you get domain crowding.
  
  You can also see a clear difference in the reputation of Stackoverflow compared to Daniweb as well, Open Site Explorer pins the former at ~12000 inbound linking root domains compared to ~1000 for the latter -- that is a world apart.
  
  Maybe it is time for Dani to start investigating link building techniques that have helped drive Stackoverflow. I don't know to what degree Daniweb would need to grow in authority but if the site got to 6000 equally high quality/relevance links - maybe that'd be sufficient for Google to start putting Daniweb back into the mix.
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  Rob Wagner: I find that the most interesting part of the article is the referral traffic increase. It would seem like the coloration would indicate that there are other issues at play here.
  
  As +Alistair Lattimore ;mentioned above it could be the marketing effort from StackOverflow and the lack of marketing from DaniWeb.
  
  Another way of putting it is the site with the best marketing, deepest pockets, and the right people promoting it can out rank a better site. Budget would seem to be just one factor in play here. Of course Google says that the best site will eventual win, I'm not convinced of that. If site A is outranking site B, and site A links to site B because site B has better content, then why not just rank site B that has the better content? That may not be the actual case here but that's what I get from the article.  ;Just my 2 cents. ;
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  Richard Hearne: There's also a great comment from Dani over on the product forum where she mentions that Google is sending far more users to Stackoverflow who then refer onto Daniweb. In effect Google is sending users tot he wrong place only to be referred on to the "right" place.
  
  This is definitely a bad user experience, but what would Google care when there's a "better" brand involved.
  
  Google "bubble" is on steroids these days methinks.