Miamacs - 10:40 pm on Jun 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

I'd complain but I see no change.
Not to any site I manage. Zero, none.

...

Except of course the changes that were predicted by recent activity on and off-site. But nothing special.

What I did notice is keywords in the URL that now count, and that stemming seems to be pretty much OFF for some sites. For some areas the "exact match" anchor text approach gave a boost. Or should I say if there wasn't a single exact match for that phrase in either of the anchors, the page dropped x2 positions. If it was 6, now it's 12. If it was 20, now it's 40. But I use exact match anchors, even though it's kind of AdWords sensitive.

If the phrase was in the url it's up, if it gets anchor with the words, it's up.

...

Which is... if you ask me...

A rollback.
Not an update.

And I don't mean the rollback of data, the SERPs aren't what they were a year ago. But a rollback of methodology. In certain aspects the algo is back in 2005. Only with the -950 kind of filters in place, the SERPs are now ... supposedly clean. ( Not in my sector, but I'm so glad you people are happy. )

With this kind of weighing of existing parameters, TrustRank related spam has more or less been taken care of. It only took three years.

I track however a lot of good sites that are still -950. With no other good reason than yeah, they still match the profile for buying links. They don't. Exact match anchor text from quality sources -- and in cases of these *cough* quality sources overusing a certain phrase, anything ELSE -- does the trick but... it's troublesome to rebuild a linking pattern.