Ranking with low quality contents?

[Henrywrites]

I've been observing some of my competitors for a while in the niche that I got my forum. I discovered that they rank higher with low quality contents. What do you think could be the reason for that?

 

[veloman]

Possibly more backlinks from high authority domains? Google obviously can't judge how good content is directly, but if lots of other good websites are linking to it then Google thinks it must be good. A bit like how the more citations a study has generally means it's more important, even if it's junk.