Former Googler: Links That Change Are Trusted Less By Google’s Algorithms

A former member of the Google search quality and web spam team, Pedro Dias, said publicly on Twitter yesterday that “Google is less likely to trust a link once it has changed from the first time it was seen.”
So if you changed the anchor text or URL path of the link, the value and trust of that link will be less than it was before you made any changes.

Is This True?

Google’s Matt Cutts On Assessing Quality Of A Page Without Links

In the latest video by Google’s Matt Cutts, he talks about how Google may determine the quality of a page of content without there being many links.
By Matt’s expression, he seemed to give off the feeling that without links, it is really hard for Google to determine the quality of the page. He said, you have to go to pre-Google days, how search engines worked before links, and look at the words on the page.
Matt explained you need to judge the content based on the words on the page and the more often the words are on the page, in a diminishing scales type of way, the more likely the page is about that word.
Google also uses a factor to see if the domain itself has value, but that brings in links.
Without links, Google simply needs to look at the quality of the content on the page, which may or may not be enough depending on the competitive nature of the keyword phrase.

Google: In 2009 We Selected Only One Of Your Anchor Text When...

Back in 2008, Moz published a report claiming the first anchor text counts - meaning, if you have a web page that has two or more links going to the same page, but the anchor text of those links differ, Google would pick the first anchor text and ignore the ones in the past.
We covered that back in 2008 and then SEOs began debating the validity of the study. Later on Branko confirmed the claims, questioning the scientific nature of the other studies.
Now, Google's Matt Cutts comes out with a video saying in 2009, Google may (which means did, imo) have picked one of the anchor texts and not counted the other. He did not say the first, but it is likely the first. First how? First in source code or based on skipping the navigation. That is unsure, but watch the video:

Either way, SEOs like to obsess about these things - Cutts says, don't.
It changes and he clearly didn't check to see what Google does now, in 2014.
Forum discussion at Google+ and Twitter.