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.