Authority linking

Steveb makes an interesting comment in this forum post:

"If Google was moving to be more topical/targeted/informative it would be *emphasizing* the deepcrawl instead of abandoning or ignoring it as it is now.

Topical is a matter of context. Links, link text.
Targeted is a matter of themes. authority sites, relevant pagerank.
Informative is a matter of quality, which is discerned via authority linking, on page words, and general popularity (overall link voting).

"Fresh" does not just not come into play for these, it is deliberately anti- most of these.

If Google wanted to move more in these three directions (they were the best before), they would emphasize the deepcrawl even more. They would emphasize the making of thoughtful, valued, deliberate decisions."

The changes google makes are the changes an seo would likely make if they were the impartial manager of millions of clients like google are. All search engines need seos because a proper seo is only working in the interests of highly targeted and relevant results. If an seo is creating pages that are not relevant or targeted they won't get the conversions. People will just click and go. If they don't get the conversions what do they want traffic for? The only thing anyone testing is conversion. For an seo, if you don't get the conversions; you don't get the business. Simple as that.