Google Tweaks Algorithm – Anchor Text Less Important?

I was reading over at BlogStorm about his “observations” that Google may have tweaked the algorithm.

Quite a number of the queries we track have altered recently and websites that previously ranked have dropped down by a number of places. This doesn’t appear to be a penalty – just an alteration in the algorithm.

The common characteristic all the sites have is that their rankings were based very heavily on anchor text rather than on-site optimisation. The changes don’t seem to have affected major commercial queries yet but they are visible when you search for particular peoples names.

For example a search for “patrick” used to bring blogstorm.co.uk in 5th place, this week it dropped down to 35th place. The sites above all have better on-site optimisation for that keyword but previously a few good anchor text links was enough for Blogstorm to rank.

I actually like the fact that the big search engines are always trying to improve their product, so a change like this is exciting!