The incoming text link effect on search engine placement
June 23rd, 2008How does the text within an anchor tag linking to your website affect your search engine ranking for a particular keyword? Anecdotally I can tell you it’s hugely important - we saw one of our sites rise to the top of Google results for ‘mountain bike blog’ simply by including that text in our trackback links. We decided to test the theory to see if this is always the case.
By now you know our setup - two pages, same keyword densities, pagerank, etc. but with one difference: one page has our target keyword in an incoming text link, the other does not. Our page without the keyword in the incoming link was actually indexed first by Google but once the keyword-link page was indexed it quickly took over the top spot in the search results. Today the keyword-link page is in second place but I think that is a function of Google getting zero feedback on the search results for this particular word (i.e. no clicks on either link since the keyword sees virtually zero search traffic, more on this another time).
Yahoo! chose to place the LINKING page at the top of results which shows us something else entirely. The linking page is a third page we didn’t intend to test here - it’s the page where the keyword link itself was placed. This shows us that Yahoo! indexes anchor text as page content rather than assign that text to the LINKED page, something that most of us assume Google does. The second result on Yahoo! is the non-keyword linked page while the keyword-linked page wasn’t indexed by Yahoo! at all.
These are certainly interesting results and the anchor-text as content finding definitely warrants further testing. Drop a comment and let us know what other SEO tests you’d like to see tackled…
