jadebox - 10:12 pm on Oct 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

My counter argument to this is that highly focused small sites (generally EMDs as well) will fall foul of this 'quality' indicator because as narrow focus for the site will by definition cause a narrow focus of inbound link text - which is what appears to be triggering the penalties.

I think I got hit by that. I have a site with a domain name matching the first and last name of the person the site is about. It's very much a niche site because the subject is someone that most wouldn't recognize by name. On September 28 or 29, traffic from Google dropped to less than 1/4 what it was.

The site has thousands of inbound links - all generated naturally as people linked discussions or articles about the person to my site. Probably 99% of the inbound links use the exact person/domain name as the link text.