Anchor Keywords seem to work differently on Google than advertised

Seen this the last few months

[Clark]

I haven't seen anyone mention this and this is just a hobby for me so maybe the pros can weigh in on it. I noticed on a lot of my queries, the page with the anchor text gets the higher SERP than the page linked to.

In a way I understand the logic, both pages are probably relevant to the phrase, the user is just one click away from the target, plus it combats a tiny bit the SEO techniques for targetting keywords. But overall, I haven't found those results as relevant as the target page would have been.

Personally I don't care about "this months algo" syndrome. Work on building more content daily and you'll always have some relevant pages showing up on google instead of wasting time optimizing existing content for google... But since a lot of you do care about optimization, I thought this topic would interest you.

[sit2510]

I tend to agree with you and recall that this phenomenon began since Sept update last year where the page containing the anchor text appear in Serp instead of the target page. This made a feel that G is less relevant because the title of that shown-up page does not contain the queried keywords. Around a month later it looks like G solve most of these problems, however, I observe that this is more or less still existed to a certain degree if you query keyword combination of "unpopular keywords + popular keywords".

During this Dominic, it appear to be more prevalent again.

[tigger]

>Personally I don't care about "this months algo" syndrome. Work on building more content daily

Yep agree with you clark, I've stopped looking at anytyhing to do with this update/dance and I'm still waiting for everything to settle before I try to work out whats happening