Robert_Charlton - 6:05 am on Apr 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

Exactly the point. Over a certain percentage of identical anchor text on inbound links cannot be done with independent decisions. Not 80-90% of the people linking will use the same exact wording of "money keywords" in the anchor of links, it has to be contrived. Natural development would be indicated by a certain amount of variation.

There's a great quote that's often applied to Hollywood or the legal profession: "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." Are we talking about faking natural development, or about natural development? ;)

With that in mind, I'm wondering how much your page title influences natural linking patterns, and how much scrapers may have influenced what is seen as natural.

Also, getting back to the original topic... fundamental change... I'm thinking that many algo changes we're seeing are in fact driven by scraper spam and by purchased links, and it might be helpful to look at how those would be combatted to get a sense of what Google is doing... and why perhaps perfectly good pages might be suffering collateral damage.