Importance of anchor text in links

[Mohamed_E]

Looking at my logs I found a search that consisted of my first name and some keywords, pointing to my index page. Weird, I know that my name is nowhere to be found, and a quick grep confirmed its absence.

So I repeated the search (site was number one on SERP, but then how many New England hikers have my first name?) and clicked on the cached page, where I found, predicatbly enough:

These search terms have been highlighted: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: my first name

In the rather informal world of hiking on the web many sites, run by hiking buddies, have as their anchor text "myname's site".

A good chuckle, plus an important lesson reinforced :)

[fathom]

It is possible that the click through came based on the best match of the other keywords and your name itself was irrelevant.

[andreasfriedrich]

Nice thought fathom. It shows how difficult it is to draw any sound conclusions from an observation if you don´t know all the variables involved and cannot ensure that all variables but one stay the same.

[Jane_Doe]

Try searching for => best search engine

The Google home page comes up on top of the SERPs. Check the cache and it says:

These search terms have been highlighted: search

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: best engine.

[stuntdubl]

I'm sure there has been many a discussion here about the 'talentless hack' search phrase or 'internet rockstar'. If you don't know what I'm talking about search google for either of these for a little insight. I apologize if these search phrases are too specific, but they helped to establish hypothesized theories on the importance of link text.

[gmoney]

Here is another example Mohamed_E’s “important lesson reinforced”:

I noticed a peculiar listing on a very competitive 3 word phrase (roughly 100,000 exact matches in Google). The page (and the Google cached page) did not mention even one of the 3 words (not even in the source code). The page I am talking about is a PR6 and is ranked in the top 20. Many of the numerous back links that I checked were basically an image with the 3 word phrase as an alt tag.