Anchor Text Experiment – Week 1

For the observant, you might have noticed that the first post in this series did indeed include links to the two blogs, as did Monday's post. So therefore, the experiment is already 10 days old…

I stated that I expected to see the blogs dropping in and out of the search results over the first week. If the links are equal, given that both blogs are being posted to and pinging at the same time, then there should be little difference.

So what happened?

7 days after the first posts & links in the first site had the home page cached (7 days ago), all 3 posts cached (one 3 days ago, the others only 2 days ago) and the archive page (2 days ago). The second site had the home page (7 days), the archive page (2 days), but only the most recent of the 3 posts (3 days) cached.

Already we are seeing a difference. Both sites had their home pages cached on the first day. Google has obviously picked up the most recent posts after their ping (cached times were 20 minutes after posts) and from this or the home page picked up the archive page the following day. But only on the first site has it returned to pick up the other posts. Time will tell whether this is significant.

But here's a quick experiment. Does click here or compare mortgages get the pages cached quicker? Both pages were added just a couple of hours ago to a section of the website that isn't cached. We'll have to see!