lol, ok well we needed a sensationalist headline to go with the de-throning of the standard proof of link dominance -ie “click here”

but to be honest the observations are not soley based on that either, there are several searches we look at quite a lot for experimental reasons and know the link graphs and histories of competing sites intricately, these are all showing losses on the anchor text heavy sites, or sites reliant on syndicated (duplicate, articles etc) content.

maybe its a side effect of the new infrastructure rather than a core “links” change, but “click here” is a pretty significant one, its kind of like when they brought in the Google-bombing filters for the first time.

“The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine,” read his blog post, “which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.”

I think they are definitely tweaking the algo for links but im always doubtful if they are going to reduce googles dependency on links much. I know links can be manipulated but i know that a lot of the new factors that people have been talking about such as user behaviour and social media citations can be hacked much much easier.

Paul