Link Anchor Text

Short text vs long

[jsbeads]

I have an article index on my website. Should I use a short descriptive anchor to link to the page or would using the first paragraph of the article as a link anchor be better?

My worry is that the page will look like just a page of links. However, if I use the fist paragraph then the chances of having a specific keyword phrase in the link goes way up.

I guess what I am really asking is. How much weight does the anchor text pull as compared to placing a link in context on a page?

[BarkerJr]

I don't know about the word vs paragraph, but link text is big in Google. If you need an example, search for miserable failure in Google <eg>

[cbpayne]

isbeads

I think BakerJr misunderstood your question.

I have the same situation - I had a long list of links to articles on a particular topic. The name of the article was the anchor text. There was no other text on the page. I thought it was a valuable resource, but without any other text, I got a little paranoid about it looking like link farm.

I do not think we know if Google like this or not.

So I pulled some sentences from each article and edited them, so the link was in some sort of context --- making sure that there was more text on the page than link text.... do not know if this helped me in Google.... BUT, it sure helps the user (and thats what Google keep implying)

[zgb999]

Google loves its own design...

A short link as title and a description below as in SERPS are certainly better than just a list with links.

[fathom]

Both! ;) This really depends on what you are attempting to do - or rather what part of your site you are attempting to rank.

Top Level pages (homepage and highest level link hierarchy) should normally be your most competitive keywords or keyphrases -- thus "short". These tend to be broadly focused pages.

Deep-linked pages (Bretts coined "money-makers") should really be longer keyphrases as they tend to be highly focused pages on one topic.

[stargeek]

I belive standard keyword density also applies here, so less is more, the more non-stopwords you have in the link text the more you dillute your keyword density.