An Excerpt from Google Engineer Matt Cutts

Google posted Ten recent algorithm changes on 11/14/11 | 8:30:00 AM
Since I have been screaming CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT these past 10 years I am glad to see that Google is making some head way for ranking the value of page content.

Here is the excerpt:

Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.

Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.