Does anchor text count as page content?
July 18th, 2008We’re back with a fresh set of SEO tests results to share and this first one is pretty interesting: Do search engines count anchor text as page content?
One SEO specialist we spoke to claimed text within anchor (link) tags did not count toward the content of the page itself but rather assigned that text to the linked page. This makes alot of sense because the text within an anchor is describing the page you’re linking to and not necessarily the page the link is on. But it’s sorta wrong.
In our test, we built two pages - one with our keyword placed 6 times within the page content, the other with the keyword placed on the page in 6 anchors pointing to a third page on a different domain. After about a week or so we had 3 pages indexed for our keyword - the non-anchor text page, the anchor text page, and the linked page itself (which, by the way, does not contain our keyword at all). The non-anchor text page gets top billing which does lend some credence to the theory that linked keywords hold less power for a page than non-linked words.
We’re still waiting for Yahoo! to pick up our test page but the way things have been going over there it might be a while. We’ll keep you posted once the pages are indexed…
So what does this mean? For starters it means you shouldn’t “send” your most important keywords off your page through links, though doing so won’t completely tank your ranking. It also means that pages can be associated with keywords even without having the keyword itself anywhere on the page - so long as the keyword is in referring link text. Stay tuned next week for more search engine test results!
