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I have 158 back-links for my site and here is the breakdown of how the anchor text is used (what is displayed in the anchor text):
Company name 41%
URL 23%
Banner 2%
keyword phrase - company name 20%
keyword phrase 14%
So then I decided to look at what is number one for that keyword phrase (26 backlinks, same PR as mine)
URL 58%
Company name – keyword phrase 42%
So then I looked at number two (163 back-links, same PR)
Company name 24%
URL 21%
Banner 26%
company name - keyword phrase 24%
keyword phrase 5%
I did two more sites and I noticed the trend was that % for “company name - keyword phrase” decrease as I went down the list.
I thought to myself maybe it has to do with order of the keyword phrase:
“company name - keyword phrase” (does this do better?)
“keyword phrase - company name” (does this do worse?)
So then I found another site like mine that has the “filter” applied too. (This site was ranked 250 with similar PR and 89 back-links).
keyword phrase - company name 98%
keyword phrase 2%
So I am coming to the conclusion that if you are going to use keywords in anchor text of your back-links you should position the "company name" or something else before the keyword phrase.
Has anyone else noticed this? I know there are a lot of other parameters at play here, but I thought this might be one small part of the puzzle.
Sometimes you need to wait for important cycles. ;-)
When do you expect the next cycle to hit? When was the last cycle? My serps have been the same for over 6 weeks, i.e. stale.
link text is mostly 'company name' + 2 or 3 variations from kw1 kw2 kw3 kw4.
However... another site is now showing up at 10 for allinanchor:kw1 kw2
BUT none of the backlink have kw1 kw2 anywhere near the links? bizzare!
FWIW: all my backlinks dropped on 10 Jan. PR seems to be still the same
Lately I'm getting the feeling from some posters that they make changes without fully understanding what elements of the algo they are addressing, and noting when those elements update across the dc's. ("Gee I made this change to my internal backlinks three days ago and nothing...guess it didn't work.")
To be honest, we never try to anticipate the timing of various component updates....doing that takes our eye of more important work.
But if/when we make important changes designed to help us with SE's, we note when the changes were made, and watch the related component of the SERP's that would indicate an update, to see what impact the changes might have had. And often even then it's hard to know with certainty what happened, since the algos are now being constantly tweaked, or so it seems. Then there are competitive activity changes, etc.
I used ATW and Alexa for my research.
URL 27%
Company name – keyword phrase 73%
Again, I am interested in anyone else that can reinforce my results.
How can an artificially or mathematically generated anchor text be most user friendly?
Ie. if link text is "Company Name - keyowrd keyword" and the title or h1, h2, etc are all "company name - keyword keyword" then the link text is valid.
However if the link ext is "keyword keyword - Company Name" and everything on the site doesn't quite match, then the link text is devalued.
Just a theory.... it would make sense in this case because most people almost always use "Company Name - keyword keyword" in their title, etc.
I have a few other sites that are not doing well and have the keyword 1st in the title - I will try reversing it.
This is not cause and effect. This is coincidence. I have some pages with the keyword 1st in the title that are doing very well. I have some where just the opposite is true. What can I conclude from this?... probably not much. There are 99 or so other factors operating on each page.
A controlled experiment of some sort would involve keeping all other factors the same and simply changing the title and comparing results... and even this might be different for different pages with different word order in text and in headings, different inbound link text, different competition, etc.
Thanks for the analysis!
The never ending pursuit of that JUST ONE THING that explains everything leads to much very illogical behavior.
Yesterday I made one small change. I changed my title tag to have the business name first and the keyword phrase second.
After that one change I jumped up to number 2 in one day! The date on the Google result says Feb. 29th, so I know that it was caused by that change.
No, you don't.
