Value of Anchor Text - Site Top 100 in Google SERP

[gouri]

If you have a site that is coming in the top 100 returns for a popular keyword phrase and then you link to your site using that keyword phrase as your anchor text from sites that have a PR of 5 or higher how much do you think it could help your site in the rankings?

[tedster]

Anchor text in a link from a URL that does pass PageRank will help you. I say that remebering that only a URL has PageRank, and not a "site".

"How much" is a question that can't be given a general answer - it's something like asking "How big is a room?" Factors involved:

1. How many other links are on the linking URL.

2. Where your link appears in the page layout.

3. How many other links to you are using the same anchor text. Too much "exact matching" of backlink anchor text can sometimes end up hurting you, if it goes beyond the standard deviations in your market.

4. Does the link look like a paid link? If it does, then it might not help at all.

5. How strong is the competition on that phrase. If your competitors have many such backlinks as part of a healthy backlink profile, then your gain might be minimal from one link.

All that said, you do have much reason to hope for some gain - good luck with it. If you are going to see an improvement, it should come within a few days after Google indexes the linking URL.

[gouri]

Thank you for providing me with some great information. It is really helpful.

Does a link from < a prominent article site > with the keyword phrase used as anchor text help? The link would be at the bottom of the article. And after your article ends, there are links to many other articles. But this is a good site so I wanted to ask if it would help to move up in a search.

[edited by: tedster at 2:11 am (utc) on Sep. 8, 2008]

[ChicagoFan67]

I have a page that is about 6 months old and has been steadily (albeit somewhat slowly) aquiring backlinks. I would like to change the title attribute of this page to a popular two word query as people in my niche oftentimes use the page title in anchor text. There are already some backlinks with this anchor text. The page is currently ranked just outside of the top 100 for this keyword phrase. Should I wait it out and see if the backlinks lift it up or take a risk with changing the title attribute?

[gouri]

Hi Ted,

I had another question that I think you might be able to help me with. Let's say you have written 5 articles for a prominent article site and you do a google search to find them. Google shows 3 articles out of the 5.

Does this mean that Google only indexed 3 out of the 5 or is it possible that they indexed all 5 but are only showing 3 of them?

If you look on the other search engines all 5 are visible.

[gouri]

Guys,

If you could please look at what I wrote at the top. If you are in the top 100 for a keyword phrase getting traffic in google how can you go higher?

Any thoughts appreciated.

[tedster]

Hard to give a short answer for that question - this whole forum is pretty much a discussion of exactly that question. Short answer: attract more links - and take every other step you can to send clear signals about the relevance of each page.

Google shows 3 articles out of the 5. Does this mean that Google only indexed 3 out of the 5 or is it possible that they indexed all 5 but are only showing 3 of them? If you look on the other search engines all 5 are visible.

It depends on what search you did. Sometimes even a site: operator search doesn't show you every url that is showing up on other searches - that's frustrating but true. Have you tried putting the full url for those missing articles into the search box?

[gouri]

I have tried putting the full url in the search box and it does not show up. I think that means that the page has not been indexed by google. I really don't know why.

Here is a question that I think someone has to know about. For those of you who write for article sites, if you have written several articles and have used certain keywords in the articles as anchor text to direct them to your site, have you noticed a better position in the google SERP?

[fishfinger]

Again, this is really a very general and hard to answer question.

The short answer is "yes, usually" but how much depends on

- the terms (i.e. how competitive)
- Google's trust/faith in the article site
- what terms were in the link from the article site
- what terms were in the page the link pointed to on your site
- what terms were in the page the link came from on the article site

[Receptional Andy]

To check if a page is indexed I tend to use [site:www.example.com/page.htm] (yes, it works for individual pages). [Cache:] used to be another one for the toolbox until Google's caching servers became wholly unreliable (and doesn't work for disallowed content that's indexed or noarchived content, of course).

In some cases, it's possible to retrieve URLs that don't appear for a search for the full URL - via creative queries like using typos in filenames. YMMV ;)

'Article' sites are a bit dubious on the whole, if you ask me. One step down from PR/news distribution sites which are one step down from being mentioned in media/news sites on merit. A generalisation, of course, but in my experience most content on article sites - and most promotional strategies that use them - rely on either heavily duplicated content or on the fact that the content/links would never get past an actual editor.

If you've genuinely got good content you'd be better off hand picking a good site to submit it to (not an article site) or using examples of past content to become a writer for a respected site.

[gouri]

Hi,

First thank you to both of you for writing.

Fishfinger: Can you please explain the last two points to me a little bit. Then I will try to answer to what you wrote.

Andy: Are article sites which have good PR worth submitting to? Because if the PR is high I think having your keywords as anchor text could be valuable.

[fishfinger]

You can fake a high PR by renting a link until the PR export goes ahead, then removing it and looking like you've got more PR than you really have for 3 or 4 months. It's a common trick used to sell links in directories (or even sell websites). It's not strictly relevant to you but it's an example of why PR shouldn't be relied on too much.

Andy's advice above was good. If the articles look of good quality then search for the terms used in them. Does the article site come up? If so then it probably has some kudos with Google. But links from article directories are usually not as good as links from niche/business/resource sites in exactly the way that directory links aren't usually as good as those from other sites.

In general articles / links will help, but don't just focus on PR.

My last two points were to do with relevancy. How relevant is the subject of the article and the site it's on to your page and your site?

There really aren't any hard and fast answers that anyone can give you.

Try to assess link / article opportunities objectively - as a web surfer rather than as an SEO or webmaster.

[gouri]

A lot of great information in your post. Thanks.

In terms of suject of the article and site it's on and relevance to my page and site and I would say that it is pretty relevant. I won't say very relevant because my article will appear in the section that my topic is about but there are many other categories in the article directory. But in terms of text of the article and relvance to my website it is relevant.

Did I answer your question the right way?

[gouri]

Can a page be indexed by Google but not have a cache page?

Maybe that is a reason I can't find the page when I try site: operator or type the url in the search box.

[edited by: tedster at 4:08 pm (utc) on Sep. 13, 2008]
[edit reason] remove accidental smile graphic [/edit]

[gouri]

Can someone please answer the above question?

Is there a difference in times between when a page is indexed and when a cache version is available?

I have seen a few times where a page is indexed but has no cache so when you type the url in the search box it returns a no cache message and you don't get the webpage. You have to search for it using different phrases to then find it. Even doing site: operator doesn't work when the page has no cache version.

This makes it hard to find the page. You have to somehow find the search terms that bring up the page.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:29 pm (utc) on Sep. 14, 2008]
[edit reason] removed accidental smiley graphic [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

I've observed that indexing comes slightly before caching.

Additionally, rankings on revised pages may change slightly before the revised page appears in the serps. (If you haven't made a title wording change, you can track this by changing capitalization of a word in the title).

Google's data is obviously distributed over many servers, and all the data for your page doesn't sit on any one machine. The synchronization among these machines depends on many internal Google factors, and the timing depends on various update cycles for these machines, your page specifics, search specifics, etc.

As Google as moving toward more and more variation in rank positioning, this kind of thing is getting harder and harder to track... and there are probably more synchronization anomalies among the machines.

[gouri]

Thank you for describing to me how Google's servers operate. It is good information to know.

Does the webpage have to be cached before you see an affect in the SERP or is indexing enough?

[Robert Charlton]

A page doesn't have to be cached at all to be in the index. Many people don't like the Google cache, and take steps to avoid appearing in it.

Here's a recent discussion on the topic...

What are the potential risks of Google Cache?
[webmasterworld.com...]

[potentialgeek]

> 'Article' sites are a bit dubious on the whole, if you ask me. One step down from PR/news distribution sites which are one step down from being mentioned in media/news sites on merit. A generalisation, of course, but in my experience most content on article sites - and most promotional strategies that use them - rely on either heavily duplicated content or on the fact that the content/links would never get past an actual editor.

Google, however, doesn't know that article sites are link farms. Matt Cutts never got that memo.

p/g