I'm a webmaster and I'm finding it harder and harder to get good
rankings in Google's search engine.
 
I did some snooping around and I've noticed that about.com has over 58
million pages indexed (site:about.com).  I also noticed that the site
ranks in the top listings on practically every search term on the
Internet... from "weight loss" to "dog nuts" (nearly every conceivable
topic).

My questions are as follows:

1.  Who built this site and who is responsible for the SEO... how are
they able to get 58 million pages indexed, and, rank on all the
keywords?  It's hard enough to maintain rankings on a small hand full
of competitive keywords... how do the webmasters that control
about.com constantly maintain high rankings on thousands (maybe
millions) of extremely competitive keywords - such as "weight loss?"

2.  Is the site a database driven site, or are the 58 million plus
pages all "man-made"?

3.  How does about.com capitalize off all that traffic?  Do the owners
of the New York Time split with a 3rd party via advertisers such as
those affiliated with google.com?

4.  I've always thought that pages that contain Adsense must have
relevant content to be in compliance with Google's TOS... I notice
many pages on about.com that contain only adsense and hyperlinks, for
example:  http://pregnancy.about.com/updated.htm.  Does this page
really meet Google's quality control standards regarding their Adsense
program?

Look forward to your responses.

Couple thoughts:

1) About.com is Old.  Way Old in Internet years.  Google values Old.

2) About.com has a *lot* of links to it.  Before the ad=spammers took
over the site, it was *the* resource for a lot of good information. 
A9.com shows over 7,000 inbound links to the site, and the various
sub-domains link between the pages constantly.

Just random thoughts . . .