Its all about links and link titles

observation about a site thats #5 on the serps

[David_M]

A site which ranks #5 for a competive keyword.
On the page, the keyword is present twice- once as a graphical link to itself (with an alt=keyword), and once as an alt tag in a graphic used as the page's content. No mention of the keyword in the title or meta tags.
The page has 45 all internal incoming links using the keyword. 90% of the sites pages have nothing to do with the actual keyword.
root/index PR6 194incoming links- unrelated to the keyword
root/sub/ PR5 with a link to the keyworded page and others
root/sub/keyword-page PR5 SERP#5 45keyword targeted internal links

It just shows the importance of having internal links with the keyword you want to target!

[trillianjedi]

It's all about anchor text and *page titles* at the moment for google - everything else is secondary to those two factors. Very secondary.

Of course, that's not to say it's all about to change again!

TJ

[jilla]

On a related note , is there any truth to the posts in other places that sites can be penalized for having identical anchor text and descriptions that link to it?

One thing I was considering is a service that will link a few hundred malls to my site. This is actually for traffic from the malls (and not really for link popularity). But I don't want to get a penalty for the links being identical to my site of course!

Same question for classified ad sites that link to my webpage . I also saw a service that will put your text link on a number of classified ad sites... Again , I want traffic but not a penalty . Thanks.

[creative craig]

I use the same link text all the time if I can, been doing it that way for the last year that one of my sites have been online and never had any problems with it.

Craig

[trillianjedi]

On a related note , is there any truth to the posts in other places that sites can be penalized for having identical anchor text and descriptions that link to it?

I doubt it.

My policy has always been that anchor text should match the page title that the link is pointing to.

TJ