Google’s March Updates for Anchor Text

Hi Everybody,
Google’s latest round of search quality updates is now available, and — at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old SEO — this month’s seems even more difficult to grasp than normal. There are a lot of words in this month’s list of 50 changes, but it appears to me that there’s not really a lot of explanation.

So be it, though. The monthly updates are a welcome thing from Google’s search team, and they’re always good to get discussion and speculation going.

With that in mind, here are a few of the items that stand out to me on first perusal of Google’s blog post.

Anchor Text Tweaks
There are two items on the list that make specific reference to how Google processes anchor text. Here they are, word-for-word from the announcement:

Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.
Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.

The first mentions a specific classifier (i.e., signal) that’s been turned off; the second mentions a new way (signals?) for determining anchor text relevance.

Your guess is as good as mine re: what exactly that means. Comments are open if you want to speculate or tell us (and other readers) what you’ve noticed lately regarding links and anchor text.