martinibuster - 9:42 pm on Feb 29, 2012 (gmt 0)

...my devil's advocate half would ask why there has not been a large shift in rankings to reflect that change if it were indeed live.

That's an interesting proposal. It has always seemed to me (opinion, not fact) that a keyword rich anchor text is going to be used most often by an SEO, and less likely by someone making an innocent citation.

Is it possible that current spam-fighting parts of the algo (like detecting paid links, etc.) already knock out the sites gaming the anchor text? If so, then what's left innocently making anchor text citations might be a group so small that removing the anchor text influence might have a negligible effect on the algo.

Possible?

[edited by: martinibuster at 12:07 am (utc) on Mar 1, 2012]