Thoughts?
As far as a timeline for when Google implemented my theories below, I cannot tell you. But it is probably some what recent.
Keep in mind, Google recently stopped people's ability to "google bomb" sites. As of VERY recently, George Bush's official page @ whitehouse.gov no longer comes up for "miserable failure". I don't think this was manually done, but more of a global algo change. Perhaps a slight tweak to the weight given to on page factors. Perhaps no more ranking for words that your page does not contain?
I believe Google may have increased the weight of your overall site's pagerank, and how it effects your sub pages. Remember years ago when just having lots of pagerank pointed to your front page allowed your sub pages to compete on major terms, even though those sub pages didnt have any targetted external links themselves? My original affiliate site, SonicShopper.com, had a PR7 at one point from massive off-topic link building. I categorized TONS of product niches generating massive traffic, and massive affiliate revenue. This died around the Florida update. Think of "seochat.com". So we don't speak in huge numbers, according to the limited results of the public Google link: checker, SeoChat has 3720 backlinks... Wikipedia has 442. Plus, they're caleld "seo chat", and have been around for quite a while. There are other major sites like BruceClay.com and SearchEngineWatch that have competed on "seo" and "search engine optimization" for years.
Even if you ignore the entire previous paragraph, think of all the pages SEOChat has about "seo". All the articles.... all the forum posts...etc. I always have held on to the basic principle, if your site is about "widgets", and every page of your site is about "widgets", this will significantly help you rank on "widgets". This might sound obvious, but I have seen lots of sites where the targetted domain is "some-widget.com", and the front page is about "some widget". Yet much of the content/sub pages are not about "some-widget", but instead mildly related topics due to a lack of specific things to write about regarding "some widget".
Now, wikipedia's article holds the #1 for "seo" and "search engine optimization".
Interestingly... if Google recently lowered the value of anchor text in incoming links, OR they increased the on page factors (both related to the "google bombing" thing), this could be an even greater bump to wikipedia.
I don't mean for this to sound like WMW rubbish, haven't slept and thought it'd be fun to start a thread like this. None of these issues matter or effect any of the strategies I implement in my websites. Keep it simple stupid works best for SEO, whatever that means anymore.
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