News Source: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk
Published: Aug 22, 2008 - 09:15 pm
Story Found By: ciaran 1731 Days ago
Category: SEO
18 Comments
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News Source: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk
Published: Aug 22, 2008 - 09:15 pm
Story Found By: ciaran 1731 Days ago
Category: SEO
18 Comments
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Comments
I’m hoping that other people will come up with evidence to say "yes" or "no". :-)
I’ve noticed this change with one of my keyword-rich domain name sites. Because of its domain name it receives a lot of keyword-rich anchor text links but has dropped down in the rankings for a couple of the keyword phrases. This possible algorithm change could well be the reason why.
Yes, I noticed similar thing with one of my experiments, earlier I thought its just me but now m much sure that its the problem with everyone !!
Considering I’ve been playing around with repurposing some sites, this is great news for me.Perhaps it also explains why things like kim-and-bills-kiddie-horse-ranch.com are ranking on things like ’car insurance rates’ :).
"Anchor text is the biggest flaw in the Google algorithm. Google wants to show the most relevant and trusted websites at the top of the search results but anchor text has no relation to trust for most queries."I agree completely. Now, who is playing down the importance of plain old basic SEO copywriting on Sphinn?When I search on Google, I actually want to find what I am looking for on what Google returns in their SERPs for my searches. Simly amazing, isn’t it? It is about time that Google finally figured it out.Bad news for the Spammers is always good news for me.
It is more likely that Google would reduce value of backlinks with the same anchor text that come from the same domain, ie having 1000 backlinks from one domain using same anchor text could be worse than having 2-3 backlinks from the same site.But lets look at the actual figures: in our case the query contains "patrick" keyword - - if you look at actual anchor text known for his blog site on this analysis screenshot - notice that anchor text "patrick" and "patrick altoft" are present but they are certainly not determining for his domain - particularly single word "patrick" - there is no title match.Looking at actual backlinks for this anchor text it seems that a fair few of those backlinks were subsequently removed later, so these backlinks are actually even weaker than they appear - but it needs to be said that the pattern for this "deletion" is that there was a link on some top blog homepage and then it moved down to deeper pages with smaller PageRank - I think perhaps this fact was reflected in the algorithm naturally.So I think what we have here is fairly weak single word anchor text that does not have good match (like title) on target site, though to be sure anchor text for top ranking matches should have been checked too but looking at them I think word "Patrick" seems to be more likely to dominate in their anchor text. Perhaps (and it’s just a thought) making title match "Search engine optimisation & internet marketing blog by Patrick Altoft" would result in a healthy increase in rankings.
Gut feeling is that anchor text variation - including use of stop words to demonstrate natural use of links - now has increased prominence.2c.
do-follow blogs, forums, press releases, social bookmarks, etc...Google had to do something and this could be part of it but looking at the poor results I’ve been getting from search results lately I am not sure they know exactly what they are doing at this point. Still...it’s better than having Live Search giving you a link to a food market when looking for "marketing". lol
This hurts so bad - i have a real estate site that has been ranking #1 (for 4+ years) in many relavant keywords that recently dropped out of site. It still indexed but i cant bring it up with any of the previous keywords.
@ibrian when you look at how most people tend to linki then that would make sense. Only thing that doesnt make sense is that this is being discussed in 2008! Click here, here, it, there, this site, said, etc should all form part of a sites natural link profile. If they aren’t there then there absence might just point to a little unnatural behaviour.
Indeed - this is 2005 material at least, but looking at the link market, I don’t think link buyers really have any interest in any more than the most cursory variations.
Gut feeling is that anchor text variation - including use of stop words to demonstrate natural use of links - now has increased prominence.Oh I am hoping that’s really true. It was frustrating to see when only "exact match" really worked...
There’s definitely been a slight change of late, but it seems to have stabilised again in recent days - although, there are minimal variations across different Google data centers,Up until a couple of weeks ago, a search for ’Chris Paston’ returned my agency top of both .com and .co.uk (this despite the keyphrase not being anywhere on the site and Facebook, LinkedIn etc having pages). Last week it dropped a couple of places on both; however, I notice it’s back on top for both engines now.I’ve got a feeling that Google are slowly tweaking the algo, but are yet to take the plunge in a full modification of the algo. It’s the next logical step in combatting paid links at source, but obviously any massive change would have huge ramifications and needs a great deal of testing first.The next year or so could be very interesting.
Just one more thought here - it could be related to different treatment of keywords that are deemed "names".
Anchor text is and always was a joke. Seriously folks, ask 100 content creaters with subject specific expertise in their field of study what anchor text is, and they wont have clue #1. It’s a tactic used by SEOs, it’s been destroyed, and it’s old.
Eric, I agree anchor text is not as powerful as it once was....but it is not by all means dead. But If anchor is dead - 1. Why is it still a staple of black hat link injection 2. Why does Google ardently combat paid linking It isn’t a flaw of the algorithm as much as it is a factor that was and continues to be exploited. The stronger Google is at their FUD, the stronger the affect it will in SERPs. You can achieve high rankings without ever focusing on anchor text, but that does not mean it is irrelevant. Many tactics have been used & destroyed, but... title tags are still important. Google will become better at looking at linking patterns, but that doesn’t mean they will devalue anchor text of links.
homelessSEO - Good points. Allow me to clarify. I think anchor text is a joke as a signal of quality that search engines can trust. I’m not saying it doesn’t work, I just feel it was naively idealistic of the algo coders to think any content that can be controlled by the content creator would be trustworthy. As we are still seeing, and as Gbombs past showed, it can be gamed. Along with this, the sites that are the MOST trustworthy are the sites that are the LEAST likely to use descriptive anchor text at all. One example: Have a look at any of the thousands upon thousands of web guides created by librarys with real subject expertise. The very folks who identify the best stuff on the web do not use keyword anchor text. None. Zilch. Nada. Which makes perfect sense given the intuitiveness (cough) of the Dewey Decimal system :) :)
I just increased my links through a link building campaign about 3 weeks ago. Since then I have seen the keywords associated with the anchor text I used rise on average 10 positions in the serps. I therefore, think this article is a little off the mark.