Content is King - NOT! Revisited

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I just read with interest the archived topic that claims that Links are King.

I can't deny that there are pages in the top ten that are there solely on the basis of their backlinks. My question is has this changed at all since Florida?

On another forum the moderators claim -- without offering any real evidence -- that the value given to links has changed since Florida. They suggest that links from not topically relevant pages have lost some of their value and at the same time links from topically similar or topically associated pages had been given more value.

This claim is based upon the belief that Google has started to employ Applied Semantics. The same tool that they are using to determine what AdSense ads to put on content sites or pages.

One of the other early claims after Florida was that sites who used the same anchor text in a significant portion of their backlinks had been punished or demoted. The suggestion was that this had tweaked Googles attention and lead them to treat these links as if they were part of a link farm.

I have not done any extensive research but on the few occasions when I have examined the backlinks of top ranking pages I cannot see any evidence of these changes.

What is the feeling of the"Link is King" group on this subject?