Using "The" in backlinks

better not to?

[BriGuy20]

I have a widget I'm trying to sell (a very popular and competitive widget, I might add). I have a web site up, which I shall call www.thewidgetshoppe.com (names have been changed to protect the innocent, but I'm sure you get the basic idea). I'm trying to promote it by putting it in my signature on a few forums.

My main competitor (who bought the name widgetshoppe.com, unbenownst to me) is PR 5 and has the #1 spot in most search rankings for Widget Shoppe, despite having a different website URL (apparently, he wants to be known as Widget Shoppe in addition to his different URL, which is, I'm told, why he procured the name). This site is well represented with ads on widget enthusiast sites.

My question is, since "the" is often overlooked or discarded in search queries (especially Google), would it be better to link to my sites using the text "The Widget Shoppe" or just plain "Widget Shoppe"? The 'the' is a part of the site name (and a differentiator), but if it would be advantageous to drop it, I would certainly do it. Any suggestions?

[troels nybo nielsen]

How about doing both? Would it look awkward and diffuse your marketing if you were to use "the" in some of your links and not in others? It would certainly be quite natural to just write "widget shoppe" without "the" in a sentence in the main text on a page.

[Robert Charlton]

There's some debate about how much Google might be looking at stopwords such as "the," but in your case I'd tend to use the "The" more often than not, since it would target both "The Widget Shoppe" and just plain "Widget Shoppe," and the former is what your company is called.

I suspect the race between you and your competitor is going to be decided by factors having more to do with number of links and quality of SEO in general, not by this one word in the link.

Beyond that, your prime goal, really, should not be just to rank on your company name... that's a no brainer. It's the other phrases, and other anchor text, that you should be focusing on.

As for when to include the "The," it seems to me that "The Widget Shoppe" functions better as a noun, and "Widget Shoppe" functions better as an adjective... ie, "shop at The Widget Shoppe for a full choice of Widget Shoppe merchandise."

Check out the current discussion of Google's treatment of stopwords at...

Google Says It Ignores Common Words, But...
... if so, why do the SERPs differ?
[webmasterworld.com...]