seth_wilde - 2:42 am on Aug 16, 2000 (gmt 0)

This is pretty hard to test with all the factors that AV includes in it's algorithm. But I believe they're currently using a method that's called "topic distillation". Basically this means that before they determine link popularity they compare the themes of linking sites and then filter out any links from non-relevant sites.

for more detailed info see section 3.2 [www9.org...]

If they are using non relevant links in their link popularity algo (which I'm not seeing at this time), they are almost certainly using some form of "page rank". With page rank your link popularity score is determined by adding the link popularity scores of sites linking to you. This makes links from highly connected sites much more valuable.