HarryM - 8:58 pm on Mar 9, 2004 (gmt 0)

So it stands to reason that G will look for signals of artificiality and dampen related pages in some fashion, while attempting to retain assigned credit for pages that are more useful and designed for the user.

I quite agree, but Google may be doing this generally without having to decide if a page is a "links" page whatever it is called. For instance Google could simply downgrade the value of outgoing links from any page when the proportion of outgoing links to text reaches a certain level. This would explain why user-friendly text-heavy links pages may show up, but a page just full of links doesn't. But of course, this is just more conjecture.

Hopefully the situation may become clearer after the next backlinks and PR updates.