The more people link to me, the further my rankings fall

[internetheaven]

It sounds strange, but I think Google's anchor text "evaluators" have a funny setting.

In the beginning, before we were well known, I did traditional link building and got inbounds with anchor text such as "widgets keyphrase".

As we grew, people starting linking to us off their own back, but mainly using "http://www.example.com/file.htm" as the linking text as it would be at the end of a review about our article and they would list the URl of the original article page on our site.

As time has gone on and the number of URl anchor text links has grown and grown (now surpassing other anchor text in some cases) we've seen our pages drop in ranking.

- Pagerank values go up for each page.

- Pages that are not linked to (or only lightly linked to) using URls for the linking text still rank well.

- The URl anchor text links are from highly reputable blog/news/related industry sites ... and I mean REALLY reputable in most cases.

Surely Google would have the sense to ignore the anchor text if it is a URl? Maybe this phenomenon is something other than a funny anchor text filter?

Look forward to your comments and ideas
Mike

[tedster]

My first sense of this is that the ranking drops are not caused by natural backlinks with the url as anchor text. Some other part of the algo is at work here.