Forum Moderators: martinibuster
This may be blindingly obvious to a lot of people, but I do sometimes forget it myself.
Go to Vendor Y or Vendor G. Retrieve all of the links pointing to an arbitrary page on your site. Discard all of those links which are external links pointing to your site. So you should be left with a big list of internal pages that link to your target page.
Go to those pages, and figure out what anchor text you're linking to your target page with. Sometimes it's eye opening - like, when you have 15,000 pages linking to your homepage with the anchor text "HOME".
But, you need to make the big list to do it, so it becomes blindingly obvious to you.
FWIW:
[google.com...]
[search.yahoo.com...]
It helps illustrate Google's continuing (over) dependence on links to help determine meaning.
Yahoo's results make more sense.
It helps illustrate Google's continuing (over) dependence on links to help determine meaning.
I think Google is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. A downside that's affected me frequently, even before Florida, is that Google serps are typically very skewed, eg, by institutions and companies with city names and high PR sites. On a search that includes a city name, it's clear that the many inbound city name links to these sites have a distorting effect.
On the other hand, part of what I think I was seeing (and didn't like) in Florida looked like it was a dialing down of link text... at least internal link text... and a lot of junk disappeared, but so did a lot of relevant sites. I think they corrected this, to some extent, in Brandy... but we all see the distorting effect that these links have.
Yahoo's results make more sense.
Yes and no. I generally like Yahoo's results, but I'm also appalled at how easily I can push a site up there with good onpage optimization and really only moderate linking. Incidentally, I think Yahoo looks at link text too... just not as much.
I'm sure Google has looked at the more-points-for-onsite option too. I can only guess the reasons for their choices; I'm sure they've tracked more searches than I have. They clearly want to make manipulation harder, and they have.
One thing about the serps when you weight onsite optimization heavier, as Yahoo does... they at least superficially appear to be more relevant because your search terms are prominent on the site. If you try to get away from that, you get into some of the kinds of problems that Google has been having.
(The question of whether manipulated results are in fact relevant because they're targeted starts to get into a philosophical type discussion that I think would be off topic here.)
I should add that all of this is ridiculously oversimplified.
Does NASA sell real estate now? ;)
...if I'm focusing on Red Widgets I should use something like: 'Red Widgets Home' rather than just 'Home'...
Yes. Here's an old thread that touches on the subject....
Avoiding excessive repetition in global text links
"Widget" really belongs in every link, but it may be seen as spam
[webmasterworld.com...]
There are some other old threads I remember, but can't find, on the subject of naming text links, which might be helpful if you can find them.
