Google Trusts Anchor Text More Than Text On Your Websites Pages

December 22, 2009

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Google Trusts Anchor Text More Than Text On Your Websites Pages

There is a seldom known fact that your targeted keywords don’t actually need to appear on the page for you to rank for that keyword. Let me explain this one for you. The search engines and Google specifically trust anchor text in a link. So much so that they will rank a page for a keyword that doesn’t actually appear on that page. This isn’t some joke or something that I made up but it is a well known fact for those that have been in a link building business for some time.

This goes against everything that you will likely have ever heard before. Here is how I discovered this quirk in the algorithm. I compete for the keyword phrase “Niche SEO.” We had been ranking # 1 for this keyword phrase for months when we where overtaken by a directory site. I was curios what was going on so I visited the site. The acronym SEO appeared several times on this page but the word niche did not.

This really got my attention so I did some research by visiting the forum, SEO Chat. I started a thread to inquire how this site could rank for a word that never appears on their website. I would soon discovered that this forum is full of some intelligent but rude people. I got my answer but I was worked over pretty good in the process. Warning: do not use this forum if you are new to the industry and you don’t have thick skin. The answer was in the anchor text that was being used in the links pointing to that page included the word niche.

As it turned out the person who owned that directory also owned several forums. Many of the links in his signatures said niche directory or niche SEO directory. So Google was giving more weight to the anchor text then the actual text on the page. I was blown away by this revelation. This like any trick used to fool the search engines eventually fails. The search engines figure out what you are doing and downgrade your web page. After about three months this site disappeared from the first page of the search results and eventually into oblivion in the ranking results.

Still that was not enough evidence to satisfy me. I did and experiment on this site to verify what was learned. I had created a page that included our Do Follow list. That page was very active and got multiple comments everyday. I also wanted to crack the first page of Google for the search, Phoenix SEO. So I renamed the page title to include the phrase Phoenix SEO. Then I added the phrase into that page several times.

This little procedure worked like a charm. It was almost like it was something conjured up by Harry Potter. Within just a few days that page made its way onto the first page of the Google results for Phoenix SEO and it stayed there for 3 months. Then almost to the day the page slowly began to descend the search rankings. I had now verified this quirk on my own site. I then changed the page title to reflect what was actually on the page, the Do Follow list.

Now, I am not suggesting that it is a good practice to fool around with Google. I just thought that you might be interested in hearing about this quirk that I discovered.

Have any of you ever come across this before?

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