What's new in Google's treatment of backlinks?

[Whitey]

I thought it might be worth breaking out some inference on Google's recently changed treatment of backlinks based on some comments on other threads by Tedster and Brett.

There may be others , but i thought this might start some thinking and observations :

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3810233-2-30.htm

Tedster - One factor may be backlinks that continue to AGE - freely given editorial links from well trusted sites, not from anything that looks like the webmaster arranged it, or that goes away after a few months.

In my wilder moments, I see this as a human editorial review factor. "Yes, the algo says this url should jump up. But when I eyeball the backlinks, something smells funny. Let's cap traffic (put the site on a yo-yo ranking) and see if the backlink growth sustains itself. Remind me to check it again in 3 months." Or so goes my fantasy.

The fix would still be real marketing, real development, getting your site known in the marketplace, networking and all that non-geeking old school stuff

and some more specific asserions here

Brett @ [webmasterworld.com...] Since Google clearly devalued links from blogs last year, they devalued forums as well. It has been my experience that most inbound links on forums come from blogs. The top 30 forums last year all lost 1 to 2 pr points on the green fairy dust bar.

I think I'm seeing a a very small threshold of tolerance for blog links , before the results move into reverse . Very few links seem to do the job better [ maybe just my imagination ar play ].

Those links had better stand up to editorial scrutiny if you're chasing trophy keywords.

What's your observation ?

[tedster]

I should probably clarify part of my remarks as quoted above. The "wilder moments" paragraph is referring to the yo-yo syndrome and is guesswork.

My current interpretation for what I see is this: some links (especially those in social media, news sites and other "minty fresh" areas) start out with more strength than we might expect. That effect then rapidly dwindles. This particular sudden burst effect may be confined to specific types of query terms -- those with the QDF or "query deserves freshness" factor.

Other links have almost the reverse nature. They begin rather weak in their effect when they first appear, and grow as they remain online and "age" like a fine single malt.

[Whitey]

Is Brett referring to blog comments spam etc or links in the general content of blogs ?