Forum Moderators: open
Just stumbled on something I found strange, trying a query on a keyword I am competing for.
When I query "widgets France", #8 and #9 are two rather irrelevant pages from an institutional French website, say www.some_institution.fr/anglais/some_page_1 and
www.some_institution.fr/anglais/some_page_2. Neither of them contains any of the words "widgets" or "France" in their text -indeed they have no text : the info is brought by images.
link: command on the name of these pages return nothing ; link: returns even nothing on www.some_institution.fr/anglais (while link: command returns 102 answers on the main page www.some_institution.fr, but I don't think this is important).
Due to the nature of pages anglais/some_page_1 and anglais/some_page_2, it is pretty obvious that no external links point to these pages.Inside www.some_institution.fr, links are clickable images, hence have no anchor text. This is an institutional website, there is nothing looking like spamming, everything is perfectly regular.
The "Cached" version is brought with the classical proviso "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page". But this is not true, links pointing to this page contain no anchor text at all.
Now, the three pages www.some_institution.fr/anglais,
www.some_institution.fr/anglais/some_page_1 and www.some_institution.fr/anglais/some_page_2 contain the words "widgets" and "france" in their meta keywords. Note that a "More results from www.some_institution.fr/" visit does NOT return www.some_institution.fr/anglais.
Hence it seems that meta keywords of your own page are of no use for SERP inclusion, but that meta keywords of a linking page can be annexed along with your own text.
(Of course I can sticky-mail the true URLs and search words to anybody interested).
Any comments?
[Edited twenty minutes later : shame on me, the keywords were in the page title! Sorry]
[edited by: french_tourist at 7:26 am (utc) on May 2, 2003]
There are quite a few factors besides on page text.. a couple of likely ones are that the TITLE tag contains the phrase or that the ALT text of the images contains the phrase. The links pointing to the page may also have an ALT attribute with those words in them.
Have a look at the source code of the page to see if you can find out more details.
Interesting stuff. Do you think anchor text on sites/pages of less than pr4 (which do not show as backlinks) may be causing this? Maybe on some of the internal pages of the site.
