Best Anchor Text - Week 5

I'll continue the look at trying to find out just what is the best anchor text for use within a link by reviewing what has happened to both sites after 5 weeks. To see what else has happened, have a look at the Best Anchor Text Experiment.

In both cases I've been lazy over Christmas and both were last posted to 14 days ago, with 9 posts in total.

Site 1 - Home page cached 3 days ago and archives 12 & 30 days ago. 8 posts are cached: 1, 3, 5, 2 X 8, 2 X 14 & 18 days ago.

Site 2 - Home page & December archive cached 2 days ago, no November archive still. 7 posts are cached: 2 X 3, 7, 11, 2 X 13 & 16 days ago.

There does seem to be a slight favouring of the first site, but not to the extent that I expected.

Automated Link Exchange Sites

Which automated link exchange sites do you use? For some of my sites, and many of my customers' sites, I use LinkMachine.

For example, CompareMortgageRates and FinanceHunt both use it to good effect.

What I like about it is it is easy to install and use afterwards. I installed it onto a new customer's site yesterday and timed the process. Including setting up a new email address (so he can keep his link exchange emails separate from his business emails), installing and setting up link machine and linking to the new pages from the existing pages, I had the entire process completed in 15 minutes.

He now just needs to check who is requesting link exchanges each month and check they are still linking back. If he upgrade to the full paid version then a lot of this is done automatically.

Best of all, the basic version if free - so he now has his link building automated and it's not cost us any cash.

If you are looking at installing an automated link exchange onto your website, then LinkMachine might be a good place for you to start.

Week 11 Results

Once this hits 3 months I'll stop posting results weekly, but I'll keep an eye on results, maybe recording the first Saturday of each month. Determined to find out what could be affecting my CompareMortgageRates.co.uk website!

Site 1 - Home page 42 days ago and 1 archive 4 days ago (no archives were listed last week). Now 8 posts (up from 7) - 4, 6 X 9 and 33 days.

Site 2 - Home page 10 days and archives 4 & 9 days ago. Posts 3 X 2, 2 X 3, 3 X 4, 2 X 6, 2 X 7, 10 & 15 days.

Site 3 - Home page 7 days ago and archives both 2 days ago. Posts 2 X 3, 2 X 4, 3 X 5, 5 X 6 and 7 days ago.

As I've noticed with other sites, there's been a lot of Google activity this last week. Maybe just taking advantage of Christmas and the internet being a bit quieter? Or maybe preparing for a refresh of the database? Results will change shortly if so.

Sites 2 & 3 do seem to be getting closer on the results, there aren't the marked results of previous weeks. So maybe I'm proving that target=_blank doesn't make any difference. There's a very slight difference, but if anything, it could be slightly in site 3's favour, which does use target=_blank.

The other complication is that I didn't prevent site feeds of any of the sites, so there are now sites out there linking to these sites by using the feeds. So that is watering down the effects of the experiment, hence a reason for letting it drop slowly.

Flash Web Design

Flash Web Design - friend or foe?

I did deal with this a while back, but it's one of those items that gets brought up time and time again. And I'm in the middle of redesigning my own website and looking to see if a little flash animation could fit in there.

But what about Flash Web Design - is it good or bad? Personally I see nothing wrong with a small animation here and there on a website. It can give the site a bit more interest and Flash Web Design can help to draw attention to certain areas - latest news and offers.

What I don't think is such a good idea is Flash Web Design for the entire site. At the very least you are dubbling your work - you should first create the non-flash site then recreate it all as flash. Then both sites need to be kept up to date.

Why this way? Well, if you create the flash web site first then the html version, you can create a website that is dependent on flash features that cannot be converted to HTML. It is then inaccessible to certain people and search engines.

There's nothing wrong with using the clever features within Flash Web Design to brighten up a site or create short cuts, but if there isn't a similar HTML version available, you are penalising yourself as the search engines and some visitors won't be able to see the entire site.

Listen to What You Preach...

Have you ever made a suggestion to a customer about the layout of their own site and then realised that you yourself should probably do the same?

One site that's about to go live has plenty of text on each page, so I've suggested to the customer that she includes a line or two at the top of each page to summarise what that page is about - telling the reader what they are about to read. It means the reader doesn't have to continue with the page if it's not relevant to them and they know the information they want is on that page if it's relevant.

A few minutes ago I was skimming through the new version of my own website and realised there are quite a few pages with plenty of text that just get straight into it. Now I've got to go through the new version and add a line or two (in a clearly different font) to the top of each page to introduce the page - for example "Below are details of our web design services available to local customers" etc (Webdesign Southport page).

Don't just talk about it - lead through example!

It Took It's Time

The site that I mentioned a couple of days ago that hadn't been cached by Google was finally visited on Monday. Coincidence - or power of a link from a blog?

I have noticed how quickly new sites are picked up that I mention on these pages, compared to those that don't get a mention.

At elast my customer should be happy now, although might be asking why I dodn't mention it in th eblog earlier - probably because I had no reason to!

Best Anchor Text - Week 4

A quick followup to the Best Anchor Text Experiment.

Site 1's home page was cached 4 days ago and the archives 7 & 23 days ago. It's the current archive that's been cached this week. The 9 posts are all cached - 4, 6, 7, 7, 10, 10, 11, 11 & 13 days ago.

Site 2's home page was cached 7 days ago and December archive 6 days ago, November archive is missing. All of the posts are cached - 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11 & 21 days ago, plus 1 not reporting the status (Google problem?).

Both pretty similar at the moment, but it's next week's results in which I though some differences might start to appear.

Google's Christmas Card List

I've made it onto Google's Christmas Card list for the first time, thanks to the success of the site CompareMortgageRates. At least it's that site that's driven most of the Google Adsense revenue for me over the past year.

Just a shame that in October the site dropped in ranking and I've struggled to move it off pages 5 - 7 of the main keyword since then. CompareMortgageRates seems to bounce around between these pages every day.

A card might not be the most exciting thing to receive, but it's nice to be recognised (even if part of the millions) by getting one. Maybe I'll recover the site soon enough and be seeing another Google Christmas card next year - it's something to aim for! And I think being on Google's Christmas Card list is something to be proud of!

Week 10 Results

A late followup on the SEO experiment.

Site 1 - the home page was last cached 35 days ago and the 2 archive pages that were cached have now vanished. The number of posts cached is up from 2 to 7 - 2 X 2, 10, 2 X 12, 13 & 26 days ago.

Site 2 - home page cached 13 days ago with archives cached 2, 5 and 13 days ago. Posts were last cached 3 X 3, 3 X 4, 2 X 5, 2 X 6, 7, 2 X 8 and 14 days ago.

Site 3 - home page cached 4 days ago and archives 2 X 3 and 5 days ago. Posts were cached 3 X 3, 3 X 4, 5, 6, 7, 2 X 8, 12, 14 and 15 days ago.

Half of the posts on site 1 are cached, all on sites 2 & 3 are cached, but there's very little difference between sites 2 & 3 at the moment, except maybe a bit more recent caching on site 2. Not really a significant difference.

Are You Website Changes Not Being Cached?

It can happen quite often. New website is published, taking down the 'in progress' sign, and you look at the Google cache of your site a week later, 2 weeks later, a month later....

But you are disappointed. The cache is still not the new site - it's still saying the site is under construction and all that hard work is going to waste!

This happens quite a lot. A customer registers their URL then comes to us some time later for a site. We publish the site and a month later we're still trying hard to get Google to visit. The owner of Empowering Confidence asked me why this is the case today, and this is her situation.

Basically, search engines visit your site when they first discover it. They come back a short while later and go over it again. If all they find is an 'In Progress' sign and no changes, then they will leave it longer before they next visit. And then longer, then longer, then longer as with every visit they find a site with little text and no changes.

They just lose interest in you. That's what has happened to Empowering Confidence and Google hasn't visited for almost 2 months, so now I have to persuade Google to visit the site. And that's not easy. It's far easier for me to work with a brand new URL than an existing one!

So what can you do if you desperately want to protect your preferred URL but aren't ready to build a site? Well, for a start, save yourself the hosting fees and just go for the email package. Why put up an 'in progress' sign? Is that going to get you more customers than no site? If you really do want to put up an in progress sign, then use the robots.txt file to ban all search engines from your site. As soon as the site goes live that file can be changed and then search engines will be all over it.

Sometimes You Don't Serve Yourself

I've spoken to a few people recently about my own Webdesign Site. It's a style that I was pleased with, 4 years ago, but doesn't really match the type of sites we're producing now.

I want it to make use of stock pictures and more graphics. But it's just a clean written, fast loading page. It doesn't really sell us. Potential customers could see the site and decide that it's not a selling point and not get as far as our portfolio.

What do I do? Well, obviously I've been intending to update it for 6 months, maybe more. But there just aren't the hours in the day. It's left to sit there and do us no favours, as with a few other of our own sites. I look after the customers, offer long standing customers refreshes of their sites when they are looking dated. But do I do the same for myself?

I suppose the answer is if the work is rolling in then why worry? But what happens when it dries up - then I'll regret not having worked on it.

Loads of work is waiting to be done and all of it for end of tomorrow. Maybe over Christmas I'll get a few hours to improve my own sites.

100 Posts

This post marks the 100 post benchmark. The blog started on 23rd August and to be honest I never expected to really keep up the posting, definitely not daily. Maybe weekly, but not most days!

The blog was originally going to be mainly about my own web design, but over time it's settled down more into thoughts and documenting little experiments and what I see happening with search results. So recently I started a new blog, again trying to get back to the original theme of documenting my Web Design Portfolio. That one is more self indulgence and memories of sites gone by. And some of them really shouldn't have been allowed to be published - they look dreadful!

Just a short post today - everyone wants work doing before Christmas, so not got long to get through it all. Need to get on with earning some pennies!

Description Tags

Do you use automated link building software on your sites - such as Link Machine?

I've successfully used this for a while now for my own and customers' sites and am very pleased with it. But I've noticed that sometimes the directories get good PRs - in the best case every page PR4 - whilst sometimes the pages aren't ranked at all.

I've also noticed a change of page rank in my own webdesign site. For years now, all of the main pages have been PR4. But in the last update many internal pages dropped to PR3, with 2 dropping PR altogether. I expect that the 2 that dropped totally have at least in part cause the others to loose PR.

What have these in common? Well I was going through my own site making some changes when I noticed that the two pages in question accidentally shared meta descriptions. Neither page has been SEOd - price lists etc, so I've never noticed before.

Then I remembered that the links directory pages all take one template page for each site. So within each links directory, all of the meta descriptions must be the same. So I started to look.

And then I discovered that my links directories in which all pages have a PR have the description meta tag missing. The others either are on a low PR site or all of the pages have the same meta description.

You can imagine how quickly that meta tag was removed from my site CompareMortgageRates.co.uk. It will take a while to see anything - especially as the site has currently lost PR. But it's an interesting theory.

The Best Anchor Text - Week 3

It's Monday so time to catch up on the experiment to find the Best Anchor Text before I post to them later today.

Site 1 has 6 pages cached. The home page (12 days ago), 2 archives (14 & 16 days) and 3 posts (12, 16 & 17 days). Like site 2, the home page is also in the supplemental results, from 14 days ago (I accidentally linked to them using www and not using that).

Site 2 has 9 pages cached. The home page (12 days), 2 archives (13 & 16 days) and 6posts (2, 2, 5, 6, 12, 17). The repeat of the home page is about the same as site 1.

From these results, site 2 would seem to be doing much better, but this is only a snapshot and does not reflect what has happened in the previous weeks. This is exactly what happened in the Target="_blank" experiment in weeks 3 & 4 - so I expect that the Christmas Eve results could be the same as today, but by the New Year it could all have changed.

Keep reading.

Variety Is The Key To Good Anchor Text

Continuing my look at how one site with a handful of links beats 489,000 other pages to reach the top of Google. Is it a matter of the anchor text is important, or is it more a case of the site that the link is on is important?

Most SEO experts will tell you how the link page should look. The page should be categorised and relevant to the site they are linking to. It should not contain off topic links. I even had one expert email me telling me to change my links page! My software not only put the link onto the chosen page, but also ran a featured list on the main links page. She wasn't happy being on that page with non-relevant links.

She should have been happy that for her one link I gave her 2 back. But she worried that other links were irrellevant. When I studied the few links that Google reports for the top performing site, I expected to see related sites. One or two were related, but the vast majority have nothing at all to do with the subject.

So if it's not relevance and the pages weren't high performing page ranked pages, then I can only assume that the on site SEO was great and the few links were powerful.

So now my own link building strategy is heading towards not hundreds of links using the same keyword text, but a few good links using different text. I can try!

Week 9 Results

There's been a lot of changes this week in the number of pages cached for each site. Seems as though Google has done a slight refresh.

Site 1 - home page cached 28 days ago and 2 archive pages cached 6 days ago and 2 posts cached 5 days ago (one being posted that day).

Site 2 - home page cached 14 days ago and 2 archives, again cached 6 days ago. 11 posts cached 4 X 5, 6, 2 X 7, 2 X 8 and 2 X 21. Most of these are within the last week, considering cached pages don't appear immediately.

Site 3 - the home page is the only one to have been cached in the last 'week' - 8 days ago and again 2 archives done 6 days ago. 10 posts were cached 2 X 5, 3 X 6, 7, 2 X 14 and 2 X 17.

It's interesting that all archives were cached 6 days ago. Sites 1 & 2 have Novermber & December archives and these are listed above the home page. But site 3 has Novermber archive listed above and the October archive listed well down the listing.

Average days since last cached on the posts is 9 and 10 days for sites 2 & 3, which I don't really think is significant. But site 2 has 9 cached in the last week against only 6 for site 3. Given each has 14 posts, in both cases that is quite low, especially on site 2 (43% cached against 65%).

There is a difference showing, whether it is significant I think only a few more weeks / months will tell.

JustGoMedia - Esther Wakeman

A lot of the traffic onto this site at the moment is looking for JustGoMedia and Esther Wakeman. I was contacted by her at the end of October and mentioned it here as she suggested their services could be useful for one of my sites.

At the time the JustGoMedia products seemed quite good and I signed up for it and put it onto my home page. I was a little disappointed with the click through rates and payment rates (JustGoMedia 52 clicks for 1451 displays - a little over 3.5% and £16.55 from those 52 clicks gave less than 32 ppc). Google policies prohibt me from reporting their figures, but these figures are not comparable. I even tried replacing the Google adverts with JustGoMedia's to see if the placement helped. But I found very little change.

Then Pat posted a comment having experienced JustGoMedia and when I checked my account it had also stopped reporting. For a week there were no impressions reported, even though I had seen the adverts in that time. We had both had our Yahoo adverts switched off because of low traffic levels, but JustGoMedia hadn't bothered to tell us. It would have been nice to be given a little bit of warning - I was planning to trial the adverts across the entire site, rather than just a single page. But I just can't understand the adverts being switched off and not being told.

If you have experienced JustGoMedia, whether the experience is googd or bad, please post a comment. If you would rather the comment not be made public let me know and I'll not approve it. But I would be interested to know what other people's experiences are of JustGoMedia.

What's The Best Anchor Text

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was reviewing the links in to a site that was getting top position on google. My interest in the site is that it is a direct competitor to one of my customers. I won't mention either site, for fear of upsetting the SEO team that did all of the hard work on the competitor!

When you see a site top of Google for many popular search terms, especially differing terms that don't bring up the home page, you would probably expect to see a site with hundreds of links in. But this site only had 19 links in, showing that it's not the site with the most links in that wins, but the site with the Best Anchor Text.

That's where I left off yesterday - what's the best anchor text? So I looked at the site's 19 links - and 11 of them were from the site itself, with 9 as supplemental results!

So what was so special about this site's links that it was able to beat 489,000 pages of results to take top spot in Google? Were all pages linking in with super rich anchor links?

Actually no. Some listed loads of brands, one or two the main keyword and the rest were the site name, with other bits added. Overall, it appears that Google considers the best anchor text> to be not the ideal keywords, but random words. After all, this must be more 'natural'.

The alternative answer is - was is the sites themselves that gave extra weighting. I'll look at that tomorrow...

What Anchor Text Is Best

Yesterday I looked at What Links Are Best - today, What Anchor Text Is Best?

The two go hand in hand. Pick a good link and good anchor text and you have a match made in heaven. A link that's sure to earn you grace and favour and move you up the search engine rankings. If it's a really good link, it will appear on Google when you check for back links, and looking at some really popular sites and some don't have that many links showing.

But others have huge numbers of back links showing, and don't necessarily perform well. It's not all about quantity - it's about quantity. So what should the anchor text include?

Traditionally it's been stuffed with the target keywords. But I think that if Google hasn't already started to ignore them, then it soon will do. I was with a customer yesterday and looking at his competitor's site, which recently dropped out of favour. The top site for a search term he's competing on has 19 links in, his site had 300+ links in. Yet it's the 19 links site that does best.

His competitor won't / can't divulge his link building strategy. He leaves it to an SEO company and they won't say what they are doing so that others can't copy. Sounds a get out to me. But why has the site with 19 links in listed so highly?

Simple, it has got better anchor text. I also happened to notice they have exchanged links with one of my (unrelated) sites. So I've started looking through their links to see how they link back - and I was very (pleasantly) surprised. More tomorrow when I've checked the rest of the links.

What Are The Best Type Of Links?

If you ran a finance website and I approached you offering you a link out of my PR4 mortgages website (no strings, just a free link) then what sort of link would you want? A couple of keywords? You site name? 'Click Here'?

Nearly everyone would go for the the first option, the rest opting instead for their site name. But is that the correct answer? If you are arranging links, then the answer should be whatever is the best type of link.

What is the best link? We only need to look at a few well known websites that have made Google Page Rank 10 or 9 and then think about their linking structure. These have got tons of links in with the anchor text 'click here'. It's sheer volume of links that Google recognises that has worked for them, not keyword stuffed links. OK, these sites now do well for 'click here', but it's not really a main keyword.

Let's look at this the other way around. If the link is using high performing keywords, is it most likely that the link is a "natural link", a result of a links swap or someone optimising their site using internal linking. On the whole, I'd say links swap, optimisation then natural links (including internal non-optimised links).

So what does a keyword stuffed link tell us. Probably that there's a good chance that link has been created to fool search engines. If Google's long term aim is to detect and ignore these SEO links, then what's it going to go? Probably, if not already, it will start to ignore popular keywords in links and gradually include more keywords in that list until it gets the right results.

So just what are the best type of links? Natural links of course - I decide to link to you because I want to. And when that happens I include in the link's anchor text something relevant to that page, not necessarily to your site.

Anchor Text - Week 2

Time to catch up with the happenings of the Anchor Text Experiment. Just what is the best anchor text to use in a link? Your favourite keywords; your site name or just something random?

Site 1 uses just Click Here. It currently has 6 pages listed on Google, so with 5 posts, 2 archives and a home page, that's 2 pages missing. The home page was last cached 7 days ago; the November archive 9 days ago and the December archive 7 days ago. The three cached posts were picked up 9, 9 and 10 days ago. Given it takes a day or two to go from cached to listed, these can all be considered to be in the last week.

Site 2 uses keyword links such as Compare Mortgages. This site, although treated identically to the first, has only the home page (cached 7 days ago) and 1 of the early posts (cached 10 days ago) listed on Google. Within the omitted results, there are also the November archive (cached 9 days ago) and a copy of the home page (cached 5 days ago).

Interestingly, I noticed that one time I linked to the sites using www., the other times I've missed that. That's what's caused the home page to be listed twice on the second site. But early results do seem to show that the first site is performing significantly better.

Playing With Links

Overnight a lot more pages have appeared in the Google listings for two of the blogs in the target="_blank". Interesting to note that the site 2 is quicker at getting from cached to listed than site 3, but has less pages listed. I expect that over the week it will catch up, and maybe overtake. Site 1 remains at only the home page.

But this is showing how important links are to search engines. Over on the other experiment, with anchor text, although it is a lot newer and I'll be reporting on only the 2nd week tomorrow, the expected results are starting to show through. This contradicts what people are currently saying, but does agree with my theory about the most recent Google changes.

This is quite fascinating to me. It could mean that Google is working towards the death of the links directory, which would not be a surprise. The sites that list well will be those with a lot of natural links in, not those that SEO 'experts' have spammed lots of link directories for (and I won't miss those emails...). That's heading towards what Google would probably like to see, but it could also spell the end of the internet entrepreneur creating his own small site and getting to the top of the rankings. Only the big companies with massive exposure will get the natural links in still.

I suppose it reflects what is happening on the high street. The big players get all of the customers, the small players are being pushed away. It will be a shame if the internet becomes dominated by just the big sites.

Week 8 Results

Definite movements on the experiments this week - a lot to learn about what types of links work best overall.

Site 1, with no links, has had the 2 posts and the archive page dropped. It's home page has still not been cached again - now 7 weeks since that page was cached. Even though it still continues to receive new posts and pings.

Site 2 seems to have lost it's home page cache but gained an archive page, just 2 days ago. There's a chanve that since there's only 1 post newer than the archive, the duplicate content filter has dropped the index. Need to post more often to all 3 sites! As for the posts, they were cached 3, 10, 13, 14 and 4X 15 days ago.

Site 3, using target="_blank" in it's links in, now shows more pages cached than last week, and more than the other 2 sites put together. That does seem to be the pattern for this site - does things well, but then the drop off. We'll see. For the record, home page (listed 2nd???) cached 9 days ago; November archive (top of the search list) 6 days; October archive 6 days and the posts 2, 6, 6, 10, 5 X 11.

Quite interesting that 5 pages were cached 11 days ago, but weren't showing cached then when I looked last Saturday. Usually caches show within around 2 days, but these took over 4 days to appear.

Checking what link are shown into the sites, and site 2 does show up as having more. Very strange, given that all links are next to each other!

With these results, looking at this week only, I'd have to say that the 2nd type of links look better, but I've learnt from experience on this experiment that things don't stand still for long.

Keep watching.

Why Am I So Interested In Anchor Text???

What is my interest in Keywords in Anchor Text?

Well, for a start as a web designer I want the best for my customers. I also run a few sites for myself and have noticed strange effects – mainly around site that have used keywords in the anchor text. As you will see from the list of links on the right, they were probably fairly validly used.

But I noticed that the page rank didn't filter down as well to these pages and the same happened on some customer sites, but not on others. The only common theme was how popular the anchor text would be in search engines.

Now in the past we have been told that anchor text is a great way of increasing a site's optimisation for a particular key word. And people used this to great effect with Google bombing, so something had to be done.

It wouldn't be beyond reason to expect Google to now say there's a threshold. Only X% of link's anchor texts should contain keywords. In the case of my secured loans pages, that's pretty harsh, so sense would dictate that maybe that's not what would happen. Or maybe it's something under development.

Whatever it was, my mortgages site fell from number 1 spot on it's preferred keyword to hovering between pages 5 and 7 on Google. And I'm still looking for the reason and trying to get it back up there!

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!

Still Not Convinced???

Am I still unable to convince you that using keywords as anchor text could be harming your links?

I maintain 2 very similar golf sites for customers. Very similar indeed. Both take a product feed from the same merchant and use it to create a list of brands that merchant sells and a list of product categories for that merchant, linking to the individual items.

Both sites are and have been for a while page rank 3. Both list all products & categories on the home page and the structure of the 2 sites is very similar. What, apart from the style, is different about the sites?

Basically, the second site uses truncated descriptions and includes the item name & price of the item in the anchor text (as opposed to just the item name). Also, the first site appends the word 'Golf' after every brand name. Given that the product list is probably a lot of keywords (Golf Clubs, Golf Bags etc) and we now have 'adidas golf', 'nike golf' etc, most of the anchor texts in the first site could be said to be keyword related.

Guess which site has recently been getting the most commissions from search engine visitors – the second site, the one with the less important keywords in the search terms.

Anchor Text Experiment – Expected Results

What Am I expecting to see happen over the next 6 to 8 weeks? Based on the SEO Experiment and it's control and well linked sites, here's what might happen.

The first week will be hit and miss as the sites drop in and out of the listings and Google decided what to do with them.

After 2 weeks, if Google is following the links then the pages should be starting to be cached. Maybe not all, but some.

After 3 to 4 weeks I'd expect the sites to be cached regardless, but only a couple of pages cached would show little interest – not following links, but plenty of cached pages would indicate links are being followed.

After 5 to 6 weeks we should start seeing difference in caching. Exactly when depends on how and when Google updates its internal page ranks. But if the links are good we might be seeing weekly caches. If the links are partly ignored then less often. And if links are totally ignored then very infrequent caching and very few pages cached.

Keyword Anchor Text Experiment

OK, so I've got the target=_blank experiment ongoing. So why not start another similar process – the anchor text experiment?

Same idea again, but I'll not set up a control site – I'll just refer to what happened during the first experiment for that. This time I'll just have 2 blogs. Both will be posted to every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (forgive me if I miss Boxing Day!!!) using short (circa 100 word) posts of my own thoughts. To keep it simple I'll just use each blog to talk about different financial terms – sort of build a couple of financial glossary blog sites.

The first one I link to with a non-descript and harmless anchor text. Click Here. Seems harmless and unlikely to give any ranking credibility!

The second one I'm linking to with a good strong financial, similar to ones I would use in link building a commercial site. Mortgage Rates. This is a popular keyword that I have previously ranked number one for, but unfortunately dropped off the top page. Hence my interest in the matter…

Now, in theory site 2 should have the better keywords and get a better chance of ranking. But if my theory is right, Google might totally ignore the second link and the site will appear as if it is unlinked.

Week 7 Results

Just as I was starting to think that the whole SEO Experiment was doomed to failure, it does appear to be showing significant results.

The first site, the one without any links in, still has the home page (cached 42 days ago), an archive page (42 days) and 2 posts (43 & 42 days). So, as expected, it's not showing as popular with Google.

The second site has a new page, indexed only this morning. It's index cache is 9 days old and now has 8 posts cached (4 caches 9 days old, 1 is 8 days old, 2 are 7 days old and the newest 4 days).

The third site, using target="_blank" in all of it's links in, is interesting. The index cached is 9 days old, then there's also an archive page (5 days) and 6 posts (5, 11, 2X 7, 29, & 31 days old).

Given the page that appeared overnight was cached 4 days ago, I suppose then that anything under 11 days since the last cache can be counted as "this week" (it takes google time from reading the site to adding the information to the indexes). Interestingly, a page from site 3 has also been updated overnight - showing as 5 days since the last cache. So maybe another sign of site popularity is the time it takes from visiting the page to being in the results (this blog typically takes 2 to 3 days). Something else to keep an eye on!

If you had the choice of which search engine behaviour out of the 3 listed above you wanted for your website, no doubt you would choose (2). Interesting that the site in which all inbound links use target="_blank" has such different results.

Keep watching.