... this issue and the theory is only based on certain conclusions by a couple of websites.

Weve seen this happening on blogs but it might happen on other sites too. The blogs in question used to have pages with incoming links from some huge blogs which we can safely assume are never going to be penalized by Google. The pages no longer exist so rather than wasting the incoming links they have been 301 redirected (12+ months ago) to the sites homepage.

When a link passes anchor text it means that if TrustedSite.com/blog-post/ linked to www.website.com/old-page.html with a unique phrase we would see both the TrustedSite.com page and the website.com/old-page.html page ranking in Google for that unique phrase. Clicking on the cached link in the search results would show a message from Google saying These terms only appear in links pointing to this page rather than highlighting the results as normal, the blog states further.

Earlier, if the old-page.html page was deleted or redirected to the homepage of that particular website, then it was noticed that the homepage would also start ranking for that query. But the case is no more the same! It seems that Google is passing the anchor text when URL structures change but not when a page is deleted or in some cases redirected to the homepage.

Again, the news is not official, so we have to wait and watch!

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