Reading Webmasterworld today - here’s a new finding about Linking Strategy

The conclusive evidence is that related links is not true. Recips are OK, it is more about the structure of the page. i.e lots of links going out with one link coming in to that page looks like a links page, so Google will devalue it.

So you got it? Get rid of your links pages and start getting links on pages with only a few links on them. A link from a directory unless dmoz or yahoo or something is just as worthless.

So search engines might be looking for overall patterns rather than specific words (or maybe both things).