vitaplease - 11:20 am on Sep 30, 2002 (gmt 0)

Best thing to do, is to think what you would do if you were Google.

The most clever boy of the class does not like to get teased that sometimes his calculations look stupid. [webmasterworld.com]

Hence all measures would be full-force against Googlebombing and Buying Pagerank.

I agree with NFFC that first of all - as much as they dislike it - they installed some manual penalties or filters such as the SearchK Pagerank sell thing and the recent "go to hell" bombing phenomenon.

The other measures seem to look something towards this:
(mainly from this thread [webmasterworld.com])

1. What I see with this update, is that if the anchortext text is not in some important part of the on-page text (title/H1 etc) of the page recieving the link, the ranking falls. ("Go to hell" does not exist on the linked to page).

This is a logical step towards facing googlebombing.

The back-side of this measure would be that "good-natured-well-intended" Googlebombing would have less effect (e.g. linktexts to a page without text).

2. A one-off high Pageranked anchortext link equalling "search query" I had from a topical directory (not ODP) pushed me into first page two updates ago. With this update I'm on page three for that "search query".

One could say google gives you a temporary boost for a new quality link, but I would guess that the "logarithmic PR" boost of that mainly the anchortext in ranking has been tuned down. That is, an external incoming anchortext from a PR7 page containing "blue-widgets" towards a page with "blue-widgets" in all the important areas, is not worth the log factor to the power of three of the same anchortext coming from a PR4 page (not that I ever believed it was such a strong factor in ranking).
In any case some more even distribution is put into place.

This is a logical step against buying high Pageranked anchortext links.