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Nice, thanks very much for the update.

I suspect that at least one of these statements is true to some extent: Contextual/in-content links have a little more weight than byline links Contextual/in-content links have more contextual relevance than byline links Contextual/in-content links are slightly less likely to be penalized or filtered than byline links I can't prove my suspicions, and I'm not suggesting that byline links are all bad (far from it), but we know for a fact that Google takes "location on the page" in consideration now when calculating PageRank. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE

Index is the current number of pages in the Google Index, EC is total number of pages crawled (cumulative) over a given period. Indexed will never be 100% of ever crawled for any site which has had pages removed, moved or url changed - this includes if you tell robots.txt to not index a folder once indexed (these go to ever crawled). Hope that makes sense

You raise an excellent point, I had completely forgotten that. EGOL has the right of it, Matt Cutts said it evaporates and aside from that we don't really know. I've seen nothing since that gives us any more information and I think given how things have changed you'd have a lot of trouble running an experiment to find out. I should have been more careful when I spoke Nofollow is something I honestly don't worry about in my day to day linking practices, to me it's just a way of indicating that my linking is not a personal endorsement of the site I am linking to. While my first and fourth paragraphs above may be null and void, the rest I believe remains true. One thing I forgot to add above (my poor memory is a theme here) is that the site receiving the nofollowed link still gets the traffic from the link and maybe some lesser residual link benefits. There is a reason that nofollows still feature in the SEOmoz analytics.