The importance of inbound anchor text

I had never noticed this before.

[rfgdxm1]

I just looked at the SERP for a critical single keyword that I am trying to do well on. On this SERP I am #6. The #3 listed page on this SERP has NO indexable content at all. This is a keyword which appears on 42,200 pages. This keyword appears only in the title and meta description of this page, and also the domain name. The cache states "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page:". It so happens that this keyword is part of the company name, and thus frequently appears in the anchor text of sites linking to it. This page has a PR of 5, the same as mine. That they are able to do so well with zero indexable content on a reasonably competitive search term shows how important incoming anchor text links can be.

[rfgdxm1]

>Most of sites, which links to me without my "influence" just place the link <a href="domainname.com">domainname.com</a> ... they just don't use the anchor text. So to avoid this "problem" I use domainname = keyword, where possible ;)

This is the real world problem. Even if the truth is that with Google it isn't the domain name, and all anchor text, the above almost always be happening, and thus you'll do better if you are keyword.com.

[fathom]

This is the real world problem. Even if the truth is that with Google it isn't the domain name, and all anchor text, the above almost always be happening, and thus you'll do better if you are keyword.com.

Not really - I agree it is hard to educate someone else to use descriptive anchors - but educate you must.

We all agree that wjdt.com makes for a bad anchor - so don't use it. Rarely will you find someone defining internal link anchor text as the domain, directory, and file name - they describe the page the visitor is going to as a short descriptive link (or title, or keyword).

Seems logical that the similar practice should work quite well externally.

wjdt.com is a manufacturer and reseller of Blue Widgets [dmoz.org].

[jayq]

Yes - I've had to "educate" myself if the have to link you mydomain.com using <a>"My Domain Keyword"</a> works way better. There are a lot of people that don't understand this.

Also, you should not forget the value of the links within your site that also add value.