Martin_Ice_Web - 8:48 am on Jul 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

Other point, maybe google is getting better at discerning and ranking higher quality pages without depending so much on link equity.

Lenny2, if that is true why should google send out link warnings?
Because it is a very important key for them to rank websites. Itīs the only rankingfactor in regard of user action they really they really could analyse besides onpage factors. All other user metrics would never give a real picture from the website because they are not able to figure out the real traffic of the site ( direct access, other search engines, facebook, twitter.... )
Even if you take the data from chrome you couldnīt say anything about user metic without making a big percental failure.

Just my two pence:
Besides all this discussion there is only two winners in this game. 1st: google - more revenue since panda, while poeple do not find any professional pages with deep content anymore but through adsense

2nd: amazon because the site ranks for nearly ever query with multiple pages and Cutts told us that he is a fan of amazon.