News Source: http://digitalgrit.typepad.com
Published: Dec 04, 2007 - 07:00 am
Story Found By: hugoguzman 1531 Days ago
Category: SEO
13 Comments
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News Source: http://digitalgrit.typepad.com
Published: Dec 04, 2007 - 07:00 am
Story Found By: hugoguzman 1531 Days ago
Category: SEO
13 Comments
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Comments
Very insightful observation hugo - nice analogy LOL! I haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe Google’s allinanchor is not working as usual. I’d love to hear what Cutts has to say.
Me too! If any of you have a direct lifeline, please reach out to Mr. Cutts and see what he thinks...
@Hugo: Hes a moderate participant here. If this goes to the front page, you might get a response.
Love your analogy. I expect Matt probably has a team of winged monkeys working 24/7 on the rankings.
Hugo,Great post. Very interesting. It seems obvious to me that inbound anchors and anchor text are still the root of the algo. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.My favorite example: Search for "click here" (minus quotes) - first page is Adobe Acrobat Reader download page. The words "click here" do not occur anywhere on the page or in the source code. It’s all from the inbound anchor text.Obviously on-page content plays a role, but I think SEOs who spend time looking at things like keyword densities are wasting time. You’re better off doing everything you can to gain inbound links than spending one minute tweaking keyword densities. A great example is how Matt Inman (formerly of SEOmoz) managed to rank for "free online dating" with a web site he built only a few months before - he put together some killer quizes with corresponding badges. Badges had a link back to the site with the anchor text "free online dating." People would grab the badge, throw it up on their blog and inadvertently build links for Matt’s site.When clients ask me what I think the focal point should be for SEO I answer invariably: link building should be at the core of any SEO effort.Again, thanks for sharing, Hugo.
Thanks again for the insights and the kind words, Mike! What’s concerning to me is that it would appear as if anchor text trumps every other factor and that allinanchor predicts rankings to within a spot or two (often times, it’s perfectly matched).That would tends to suggest that the authority of the links in question (with the keyword in the anchor text) takes a back seat to the sheer number of links that contain that anchor text.That’s a scary thought, though not necessarily accurate from a statistical point of view.
Right, I follow your logic here. I’m just hoping the algorithm can’t possibly be that simple.Definitely an interesting point. It would be great if Matt Cutts would chime in and drop some G knowledge into this conversation.
Could your experiment have been skewed by the fact that these are all very competitive terms? It would seem in a very competitive environment where the number of incoming links is massive it’s making all over factors less relevant. I think all this experiment really shows is that incoming links is the only truly scalable factor where as other factors such as keyword density, keyword usage in titles, headings and content are all finite so to speak and definitely not capable of the massive amounts of growth required to place high for competitive terms.I think you’ll find for niche markets (less competitive markets) that anchor text for incoming links isn’t going to have such a perfect correlation with actual search rankings. All this experiment really proves is that incoming links is the only growable value, not that it’s given the most weight. Regardless though I can appreciate the article for providing some nice food for thought :)
Special award granted on the most unreadable blog presentation ever."Could your experiment have been skewed by the fact that these are all very competitive terms?"Absolutely right. We’ve long seen a lack of correlation of allinanchor to rankings for general sites.The amazing thing is that anyone is having this conversation, marvelling at the impact of links. But don’t underestimate the impact of on-page optimisation, either.
Thanks for taking a shot at the blog presentation, iBrian! This post wouldn’t be complete without some feedback from the nitpicker contigent. And yes, the blog is in the process of being updated. DigitalGrit is in the process of merging with Zustek to form Zeta Interactive, so the blog is in limbo mode for now.Gamermk - great insight. I think you hit the mark, sort of. The way I would spin it is to say that anchor text is the by far the most influential element because it is scalable. In other words, anybody can optimize the on-page elements more or less equally, and as most of us know, those on-page elements are rarely the end-all-be-all. So it’s the page that can garner the most links with anchor text that wins the race.Anyhow, back to the discussion. Feel free to chime in with actual examples of non-competitive searches where allinanchor does not predict actual serps. Here’s an example where they do:neverending story the nothing(great children’s movie, by the way)
"This post wouldn’t be complete without some feedback from the nitpicker contigent. "Perhaps you may want to complete it before submitting it to social media sites next time. :)
Wow, does allinanchor: still even work? I don’t think I’ve done one of those queries for a couple years..
Hey Matt! Thanks for chiming in. I made sure to preface my entire post by saying that I wasn’t sure that allinanchor still worked. The fact that’s it’s not on your official search command page would seem to suggest that it isn’t.Can you do a little digging from the inside and find out for sure? I’m sure it would make a lot of webmasters happy to know whether or not it’s still a viable option.