Does googe give more weight to anchor text or text surrounding links?

How important is anchor text?

[Clark]

I always thought that anchor text was way overrated. Let's take some examples of how people tend to link. Which do you think is most prevalent?

1. I saw a great article [google.com] in the NY Times about How to Optimize for Google.

2. I saw [google.com] a great article in the NY Times about How to Optimize for Google.

3. I saw a great article in the NY Times [google.com] about How to Optimize for Google.

4. I saw a great article in the NY Times about How to Optimize for Google [google.com].

5. I saw a great article here [google.com] about How to Optimize for Google[/url].

I'd guess more often than not, the relevant keywords would show up in the paragraph surrounding the link rather than the link itself.

Does google give as much weight to the surrounding text as the anchor text itself? I used to think anchor was more important but in analyzing a few urls recently I feel that they are indeed giving as much weight to the surrounding text.

[kaled]

I think that links must be well distiguished and, even so, not disturbing the user. If a user cannot recognize a link when viewing it, then i think the link is bad without caring neither anchor nor surrounding text.

For the most part, I agree with you. However, I don't like links that are barely visible until the mouse moves over them. In fact I'd go as far as to say I hate having to hunt for links with a mouse. Anyway, we're offtopic here.

For the most part, I think CLICK HERE links, etc. tend to be used for internal site navigation. Such links may in any case be treated differently by search engines. On my site, I use tables of links on some pages. Such a table may contain many CLICK HERE links with a description in the following table cell. This may be dreadful from an SEO point of view but looks neat and tidy and is easily understood by the reader.

Now I am certain that some web designers would dislike my approach - I DON'T CARE. However, I do care if search engines react poorly to this design. I accept that search engines may be biassed a little towards anchor text, but it would be just plain stupid to ignore nearby text altogether.

Kaled.

[rickagain]

Great discussion, thought I'd do a little test... I did an 'allinanchor:' search on one of my less popular 3 word key phrases.

167 results.

On the second page (18th) I saw a site I knew didn't have too many backlinks - checked and saw there were a total of 4 links listed.

2 of the links were from the web designers site, they link to the URL and have a short description. The linked URL contains kw1, the surrounding text contained kw1 & kw3.

1 link form a related site linked to the URL with a shorter description. The linked URL contains kw1, the surrounding text contained kw1 & kw3.

The last link was from a page with over 100 links on it. The linked URL contained kw1, the even shorter description was kw1 kw2 notakw kw3.

NOTE -
this site is in dmoz (on a PR 0 page), the category contains kw1 & kw2, and this sites URL contains kw1 and its description contains kw3.

---

Then I did allinanchor:"kw1 kw2 kw3" and only displayed 85 results. Again, thsi site was on the second page at 16.

---
Then I used a mis-spelling of kw3, which only displayed 20 reults. At number 18, I saw one of my pages. It showed 5 links - none-of which used mis-spelt kw3 in the <a></a>, 2 of which didn't even have mis-spelt kw3 anywhere on the page, leaving 3 pages with mis-spelt kw3 on the page, but not near or even associated with the link.

The 2 pages without the mis-spelt kw3 on them ARE sub-pages from sites that DO target the mis-spelling on other pages!

---
From this I am guessing Google likes the words in the anchor text best, but will settle for the words on the page that contains the link... AND at a streach will even consider links from a particular page that it 'knows' is from a site related to the keywords.

[Herenvardo]

Ok kaled: I don't like it but I have to confess: you're right. Click here links can be usefull for the user. Even so, i don't like them. It's personal. When I link to other pages on my site, I use allways the page tittle as link text. Users like to click "Products" and then see a page tittled "Producs", for example. But I've a download section where I've put a table with all available download products. Between the product name and description there is a column where the links to the product are. Each link is an image: the icon of the destiny file type. This is close to the Click here links, but there is something more: as alternative text, I've the product name and its type as:
name-format
So, in my site, the user always knows to wich file type he (or she) will be sent when clicking a link and, in the case of pages, its tittle.

And returning to the main topic:
The anchor text is perfectly delimited by the <a> and </a> tags, so any program, routine or robot can retrieve it. But where surrounding text ends? This cannot be well determined by a machine. Google can look through the same paragraph or table cell for the keywords, but they must stop here. They cannot go beyond because the text could be not related; but it might happen that the link is in one cell and its description in another one, or they are seppared by a <p>. How can a machine determine where the related text ends? It can't. So, as nearer to the link is the text, more weight it can get; and ¿where can be the text nearer to a link than inside the same link? So, the achor text will always have more weight than surrounding text.

[Namaste]

sorry for coming in late

I've tested anchor text versus surrounding text. Anchor text won

I believe this test itself is faulty and inadequate.
You may need to test anchor vs. surrounding vs. other factors to arrive at the right answer.
You have reached a faulty answer because you have not considered all the factors

For the last 4 months I had this one particular page beating me for the search term Widgets Germany. And check this out:
1. His Anchor text dosen't match the title tag
2. He has no surrounding text around the anchor
3. His title has 7 words in it vs. just Widgets Germany on my page
4. His page PR is 5, mine is 6

so, if these don't count, then what does? After close examination I found

1. The page is receiveing a link from a page that only has around 30 outbound links on it, whereas mine has closer to 90
2. The Widgets Germany page of his is stuffed with the keywords

And ofcourse he is no longer beating me

I would thus tell you that link anchor & surrounding text are mattering very little these days.

This confirms with an interview I read recently of Krishna Bhat (Google), who subtly stated that it's all about on page factors.

[mil2k]

Krishna Bhat

Hey that should be Krishna Bharat :)

But the context of the interview if I am not mistaken was about Google News. Anyways no one of us can confirm either side of the argument with authority. Of course your views helps us keep things in perspective and not get carried away ;)