But if he had 50% keyword density to begin with he never would have ranked as highly as page 2 right?

Or maybe the existing over-optimization, coupled with the new anchor text made it the last "poof" that burst the bubble.  That makes sense to me.

Somehow missed the bottom of your post there where you responded to my question....  Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

So you think 3 or 4 new links and one anchor text change could be enough to result in any rank change, positive or negative (assuming at least a decently competitive keyword term)?

I don't know; I'm just asking.

I'd like to hear the community's opinion on this, because I simply can't imagine Google is micromanaging keyword penalties like this.

We know Google is paying attention algorithmically to the factors you mentioned - anchor text, page titles, backlinks - but we also know these are just a few factors out of hundreds that determine a ranking.

Really, in the grand scheme of the web or the thousands of other results that also show up  for the keyword term you're talking about here, are the tiny changes you made big enough to make any difference at all?

Is the algorithm really that sensitive?  I don't know, but I really don't think so.

Anyone else?

My returning visitor count has jumped 20% - 80% as well depending on the source.  I think the key here is the following from Barry Schwartz's article:

A session now counts as "ended":

"When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid."

So returning visitors are getting counted as a separate session each time they visit your site via a different source type - at least that's how I interpret that.

It would make sense then why returning visitors has gone up...  But that would mean returning visitors would go up for everyone to one degree or another depending on how engaged and how many visits to conversion a site's returning visitors average.

Hence why I want to know if everyone is seeing this phenomenon to one degree or another or are just some people seeing it?

Thanks for responding Gareth.  Anyone else seen weird stuff going on with their analytics?

I didn't say I was bothered...  All I've done is put together a list of possible causes and now I am crossing them off one by one.  This is a possible cause based on what I have seen other people saying... and all I want to know is if anyone else has seen a similar phenomenon.

PS - How can you be so sure?

Ever since Google Analytics changed their session parameters August 12th I have seen a 20% jump in organic traffic & bounce rates along with a decline in pages/visit and conversion rate.

To be clear, I don't put a whole heck of a lot of stock in these metrics as stand-alone indications of how my site is performing.  I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this blip.

I noticed some other people mentioned a similar phenomenon in other SEO forums and blog comments, but nobody seems to be talking about this here at SEOMoz (unless I just haven't looked in the right place).

I'm not saying the change I noticed has anything to do with the session update, I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar so that I can either cross it off the list of possible causes or explore further.

At some point in the past I read or was told that No Index, No Follow tags on category and tag pages were a good thing on a standard WordPress blog in order to prevent duplicate content issues.

Is this still true or was it ever true?