SEO: Keywords Part 16 – Anchor Text
While each day I think that the topic is pretty simple, this one is sometimes tough to convey. Anchor text. You know, it’s the blue, underlined hypertext link. The words used in the link are considered your anchor text. After years of Google being jacked around by underhanded webmasters who were aggressively cheating their way into the rankings, Google decided to clamp down and take the majority of the power away from the webmaster and give that power to the voting public. Now, unscrupulous web designers can’t cheat their way to the top of the listings as they once could. As you may recall, when Google first started, you’d be searching for something innocent like restaurants and you’d be confronted with illicit images that were quite objectionable. How did those companies get their objectionable sites to come up when you were searching for restaurants? Easy. They’d fill their site with words that were unrelated to their content, just to get you to their site. They’d hide the word “restaurants” in their code and Google would naturally think that their page was about restaurants rather than something much more lude.
Google saw the same results and eventually they changed things. I think it was about November of 2003 when they had their biggest dynamic shift. They changed the way they ranked sites and overnight, sites that were at the top, fell to the bottom of the results. Unfortunately, some legitimate businesses went from success to failure overnight. Their entire source of business dried up and no one visited their sites any more. That was the cost we had to pay for more relevant results.
So how did they begin ranking sites? They started using the number of links leading to a site as the main indicator that a site was really about something like “restaurants.” If Google saw that your site had 100 other sites like linked to it with the phrase “restaurants” they figured that your site must really be about restaurants. After all, if you ran an objectionable site, you’d have a hard time getting 100 other sites that would link to your filthy site, especially with a link that says “restaurants.”
You see, it’s generally assumed that the text in a hyperlink describes the page that it leads to. For instance, if a page says, “click to check out our list of great restaurants,” you’d assume that if you click on the link, it would take you to a list of great restaurants.
So Google began looking at the anchor text as a way to rank sites. Links became the primary means for ranking because the results could be more reliable since the voting public essentially controlled a large part of the equation.
If you could get 100 sites to link to your restaurant with a link that said “great restaurants in Denver” then your site would likely be found toward the top of the search results when someone searched Google for that phrase. Sure, your site still needed to be about restaurants in Denver, but the majority of the weight when ranking your site came from the other sites that linked to your site.
Since 2003, the ranking algorithm has become even more sophisticated and today, Google incorporates more than 100 different factors into their calculations when deciding where your site will come up in their search results.
Tomorrow, we’ll pick up here and talk more about anchor text to help you avoid making some of the more common mistakes.
Chadd Bryant
