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Is there a cutoff point where the anchor text becomes diluted after so many words? Should I request that they narrow it down to 3 or 4 words in the hyperlink?
skipfactor, are you talking about for all search engines, or just Google?
There are 8 other outgoing links on a PR6 page. Mine and another one have around 11 words in the hyperlink:
"[url]BIG BLUE ROUND WIDGETS -
Gotham City big blue widgets and little widgets by the Widget Company[//url] Big blue round square red widgets blah blah blah..."
It's all straight-up relevant coming & going. I guess my question is: is it a good policy to cram 2 or 3 phrases into one's anchor text, or shoot for one keyphrase and move on to the next link for one's next keyphrase?
or shoot for one keyphrase and move on to the next link for one's next keyphrase?
Long-long linked texts do not look highly appealing. It is not natural on a web page. Limit to 3-5 words and you should be fine.
Even though there are some Yahoo Stores that do extremely well in the SERPs, they do lose the advantage of having that internal linking text properly constructed. Many of them I've looked at are not ranking well because of the sites themselves, but because of PR, # of links and use of keyword phrases in anchor text of inbound links. There is a disadvantage in not having precise phrasing that's relevant.
One site I'm familiar with just newly put up additional domains, apparently both to harvest some extra page rank and get *precise* link text pointing to the main domain. Simply because the main domain has no such ability within the site. There is even one domain (maybe more, haven't checked further) that is absolutely nothing more than a single page doorway site that's chock-ful of text with numerous keyword phrases in anchor text, all pointing to the same page on the main site - and each link has an exact keyword phrase. Not a good practice IMHO and nothing I'm inclined to do or encourage, particularly if it's that easy to find, but it does illustrate a point.
The reason I'm bringing that into the discussion is because I believe that even though it's not *bad* to have more than one phrase in anchor text, and is does working in several instances I could cite, it is a slight dilution, even with only a few words, and the more words the more dilution there is. For one site I've just seen a negative affect this time around - no way a penalty, but loss of ranking for the phrase in anchor text that isn't supported by other links that are using the precise phrase. The site has dropped in ranking for phrases that do not have specific anchor text supported by other links with precise keyphrases, and yet has remained the same for the search terms that DO have inbound links with the precise phrases - on themed pages with supporting optimization elements. There could well be othern factors, so it's not 100% definitive, as little ever is, but this is one of the things I look at and there will definitely be a change made.
It's an advantage to have the precise phrase in links, especially for internal links. And I also believe that if they're search phrases that people out there are actively searching for it also makes sites more usable for the visitors and navigation easier to understand.
It's number of words in the anchor text, and the word order of them, plus the relevancy of the pages the links are on - as well as the other factors that support the link text. I'd rather opt for a variety and not have them all the same in all links. Maybe a couple combined if there's no choice, but some should be precise, and a variety rather than all the same.
