Seoering - 11:27 am on Sep 2, 2010 (gmt 0)

Since late May/ early June I have seen monumental changes in the SERPs with URLs appearing that have a number of low quality sitewide links, but include the URL name in the anchor text - which is keyword rich. So, in over 100 examples (for a extremely competitive term) that I have investigated the factors are the same: - Massive improvement in Google SERPs for keyword rich URLs - Under 500 external links - Keyword rich anchor text - Do not generally perform well for multiple search terms - Domain age is under 1 year (some went live in May/June) - Keyword rich internal anchor text that hinders usability

I've taken this from another thread that I started but I think it is relevant for what I am seeing now. I'm putting together a Matrix diagram to analyse these factors against a number of URLs who were there pre-May and post-May.

Problem is that any buffoon could setup a website like this and spam blog comments (trust me that is a lot of the link equity) - so why is this happening? Surely this is a massive backwards step? Welcome to 1998.