Change in on-site anchor text.

Leads to jump in position

[Haecceity]

For a long time the links on my information site that point back to the index page have had as the anchor text, "Sitename keyword homepage". We've been bouncing around for a year or so at #8 or #9 (out of 67,200,000), which is okay, but not good enough considering the amount of information we're offering.

Four weeks ago I decided to change the link to read simply "Home". Today our position was #6, which I'm pleased with. This change was the only significant one I've made in the last month, and I'm sure the two events are related.

I thought I'd share this for anyone who might be interested.

Now if I could only work out how the one-page and highly inaccurate site about my keyword is managing to rank #5, I'll be delighted.

[tedster]

Now that's interesting to me. I see sites linking to their Home Page wth keywords that certainly do very well -- but it could be that the repetitive use of a keyword in anchor text is attracting a bit of that "over optimization" negativity that Google seems to deal out.

I notice that the ranking change just happened as part of everflux and the change was made AFTER Jagger update finished. So it was apparently not an algo change (although there may be some "dial twisting involved.) LEt us know if this changes again in the near future.

[Haecceity]

Well, back down to #8 today, but with everflux that doesn't surprise me. I thoroughly expect to bounce back to #6 at some point, and hopefully I'll stick there for a while.

The jump to #6 was the only movement I've seen with my site in at least a year. Like you I suspected there was some kind of overoptimization penalty going on, which is why I made the change.

[Animated]

a few inbound(different sites) links with the keyword in its anchottext and you are assured to stay in top 10 or 5:)

[steveb]

You change ever page on your site, making it fresh when crawled.

[Haecceity]

a few inbound(different sites) links with the keyword in its anchottext and you are assured to stay in top 10 or 5:)

Well, the depends entirely on the kwyword in question, doesn't it? Even though I'm in an information field it's very competitive and "a few" inbound links with the keyword in the anchor text is not going to make much difference. A few dozen or a few hundred might.

Certainly, sites that have the keyword in the domain name have an advantage since the keyword is likely to be in the majority of links.

[Haecceity]

Up to #5 now on [64.233.179.104....] That's higher than my site has ever been. Very interesting. I hope the results on that server propagate more widely.