gford - 1:36 pm on Oct 3, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm getting a growing sense that anchor text has been dialed down and on-page factors are dialed up. What I've noticed is that pages that were "Google bombed" into ranking for odd phrases are no longer getting that traffic. And added, I'm seeing more sensibly targeted traffic based only on on-page content. If this is so, I like it. It makes damage from malicious-intent backlinking less likely. I guess it would also undermine the perfomance of paid text links as a ranking booster. Anyone else seeing something like this?

I am definitely seeing this. Anchor text seems to be dialed down considerably but it seems to be affecting sites less content rich. The content rich sites seem to be holding par or improving.