themaninthejar - 12:58 pm on May 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

When doing a site:domain search I have always expected to see the site's pages linked using the title tag of the page. Last week I did the same search and discovered pages being linked in the following format:

Internal anchor text for the page - Site's main two-word keyphrase target - Brand name

I posted this elsewhere on here at the time. I'm reposting now as I just went though the search again and counted 72% of my pages listed in this way (last week I estimated just under half were in this format). I can only speculate about what this means (or even whether it's a recent development as I don't conduct this search very often) and would be interested to know if anyone else can see this with their sites. Is this Google making "notes to self" for the evaluation of anchor text on incoming links? Feedback appreciated.

Closer to the subject of this thread, I've conducted an extensive cull of keyword use across all elements of my site in an attempt to "flatten" out the overall usage to a more "natural" profile. I started out with the following profile for my five most used words info from WMT Content Keywords):

Word #2 of targeted keyphrase - 21% incidence;
Word #1 of targeted keyphrase - 19%;
Untargeted word - 3%;
Untargeted word - 3%;
Variation of targeted word #1 - 3%.

When presented in that format it's undeniably keyword stuffing (though I never set out to make it so).

I've seen a closing of the gap since I started the edit process on 19th April. The profile is now 16/11/4/4/3 and this has coincided with an improvement in ranking from page 11 (at the worst point) to page 5 (although, as ever, there's nothing to prove the connection).

I'll update as (and if) I see further improvements.