Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Suppose you have half a million users of this software all outputting their specialized "widget application" html, with links pointing in. A good thing?
Now suppose the title tags were all over the place, you know, 200 JQ Shoe Industry title tags, 5000 Canadian Widget Bureau title tags, etc. Won't this have the effect of branding your software site with all of this irrelevant stuff, so that the effect is like signing half a million guestbooks and waking up one morning to find that your web site is relevant for the keywords, "Please sign here."
Could it be a bad thing?
Isn't every web site relevant for the sum of what it's own pages say it is- the "native" meaning, plus the off-page factors from the inbound links?
Could it then be possible for a web sites "native" meaning be overwhelmed by off-page factors, to the point that the "native" meaning is diluted or at worst, erased?
Anybody have thoughts on this scenario?
That is the kind of branding you want.
Granted people could "google bomb" (I believe that was the term coined) you with any phrase if they so desired...and well...nothing is perfect.
However, if more engines do start to utilize the anchor text in addition to the other sites relevance to determine the relevance of that particular link, they still have to make a decision on what to do with all the other links that the algo determines to be "off topic".
My hunch is they would simply not include those in a 'theme' like relevance calculation, because they are trying to distill a large amount of data into a cohesive rank - which, in many cases, is very tricky.
Though of course there may be other considersations - me? I wouldn't worry about it. But - I would try to make sure that the name of the software contained a keyword or phrase related to what potential customer's would search for ;)
I understand what you are saying - but it isn't a real problem.
I wish I had those problems :)
Seriously tho - I wouldn't think twice about it. As already stated - I wish I had a the situation where I might have too many links.
that's quite a nut. the first thing i thought about is the thumbnail creation with irfanview [irfanview.com] which seems to be a quite popular image viewer at all.
it's thumbnail creater with html output places a link 'created with ifranview' on each thumbnail page. but i think the link text will be more important then the title of each of this pages (the user can change the title).
but how to proof?
a check i did was irfanview +urlaub (urlaub = engl. holiday) and voila #2nd is just such a thumbnail page [homepage.schleswig-holstein.de] (counting up, one after another) and not the app itself.
irfanview.com, the domain of the software itself, isn't in the serps at all.
i think it won't have this kind of strange effect like in your scenario.
-hakre
;)
<edit> should have been [allinanchor:"powered by"] but that doesn't change much</edit>
One of my client provides service to other ecommerce stores. They in turn put up a logo and anchor text to our client's site. While Preparing the logo and text the programmer did a mistake and gave some frivolous text like "Click here" as anchor text. There were a total of 2 links from that logo. One with the Keyword rich anchor text. The other something like "Click here". It so happens that the "Click here" text is one of the top Keywords for the site.
Conclusion :- People feel more comfortable on clicking simple text than keyword rich Text.
Just thought it would add an interesting perspective. :)
[edited by: mil2k at 6:49 am (utc) on July 18, 2003]
Conclusion from a limited data set, and without regard to conversion rate.
I added a simple? as a link on several test sites. Curiosity killed lots of cats. People are naturally curious but curiosity doesn't equate to sales. Descriptive anchor test delivered the best conversion rate.
Conclusion from a limited data set, and without regard to conversion rate.
I agree completely :) Just thought to add an alternate observation. BTW you do a lot of experiments ;)
The psychology of "the buy" fasincates me. Getting traffic is like herding sheep. I only want to attract sheep that have credit cards and itchy clicker "fingers". ;)
what's that for a scenario?
