ZydoSEO - 8:26 pm on Aug 12, 2008 (gmt 0)

I will say at a minimum, I have seen evidence that Google and others can discover pages/sites where the site is only mentioned in a article as text... absolutely no link to it anywhere on the internet. It's not that much of a stretch to believe that Google can detect strings like [*...] or *.com within content even if it is not a hyperlink and actually crawl the page/site referenced. Whether it is used in their ranking algorithm is a different story. No way to confirm.

I have seen further evidence of them following non-link references similar to this in other less obvious places as well.