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- Sphinn It!
Posted By: patrickaltoft 96 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.seoco.co.uk)
Category: Google SEO
"Results of Google Experimentation - Only the First Anchor Text Counts"
This made me panic a bit, because it would have meant that the footer link I had on this blog was not helping my homepage rank.
11 Comments


Comments
The new design is really slick!
Hey Patrick! I dig what you were going after with this post, but I think it was a bit misleading to title it "Debunked:". I could see "Debunked?" maybe.
Great topic and I'm glad to see someone delving into this to verify VanDeMar's (and SEOmoz') results, but I don't think you've done enough to debunk this yet.
Just my humble two cents.
hugo I didn't write it, I just sphunn it. :-)
Glad to see that debunked. It sounded completely wrong to me when I originally read it just from my own intuition and having optimized hundreds of sites. I've been meaning to test this one for awhile too, but haven't yet. Prolly will one of these days...
My bad Patrick!
Don't think it's debunked quite yet, Jill.
Maybe you should delve deeper into and see what you come up with. I would love to but I'm two swamped with client-side stuff. For the time-being I'm sticking with VanDeMar's results set.
Actually, Jill, I wouldn't call it debunked just yet either. It's easy enough to test though, you really should. The more data the better.
I have tested that + a way to get around it. I am waiting for the final indexing of links to drive the conclusion home, but from what I am seeing it definitely supports vandemar's and seomoz's conclusion. The second link was not counted.
Will post about it when I have final results.
Perhaps it's more of a numbers game, look at the index page of the blog, 2 links saying 'about us' and 5 links saying the name plus the 5 links with the name anchor text are in the content and the 'about us' links are in the navigation.
So is Google giving more weight to same links but different anchor text or less weight to nav links/more weight to contextual links?
@neyne - there is no contact form on seo-scientist, and the Send a Message functionality on Sphinn has never worked... can you drop me an email at my Endless Poetry address please (assuming you see this)?
Thanks.
I am currently testing this as well and can say that the results I've seen also support Michael Vandemar's findings.
I'm sort of testing this now too. My test isn't all that controlled, however, so the results may be inconclusive. But I'm curious as to what I notice anyway.