Should we write xyz.com or xyz for a link text?

Which one is better to link a site called xyz.com, xyz.com or xyz

[AjiNIMC]

Hi,

I am planning to put four government(non-profit organization) sites on each of my article pages. I think this will help my article pages to get a good PR. My questions are:-

1) Does this sort of(linking to non-profit sites) linking has a bad side?
2) All of them are non-profit organizations, so getting a proper text for link is tough(not impossible tough). So I write example.com which will be linked to [example.com....] Does this writing "example.com" as a link text will have a negative push? Or should I write example as link text.
3)Am I going in the right direction?

I am a bit confused, please help me to clear it.

Thanks

Aji

[edited by: ciml at 6:46 pm (utc) on Oct. 14, 2003]
[edit reason] URL Fixed [/edit]

[ciml]

I think that's an excellent question Aji.

Plenty of people have suggested that keywords in URLs as anchor text shouldn't count. If Google decided to do this, they might tread hyphens as non-whitespace characters (like underscore) or ignore the anchortext if it's word1.word2 (where word2 could be com, net org, uk, de, etc.)

Does anyone think they do this already?

[dirkz]

I would write what seems appropriate :)

Sometimes it's clear how to link (e.g., by the title of the linked page), sometimes something different will better fit into context on the linking page. If you're lazy just use the exact URL.

I think this will help my article pages to get a good PR.

The way to actually gain PR would be to ask the non-profits for a link back :)

Seems that you want to build a Hub, but IMHO also a hub gets its popularity by lots of other pages linking to it because it's a hub, eventually.

Ciml, if you mean that anchor text is treated as a keyword for the linking page I think this is the case. I have seen pages ranking for a brand name just because they are linking the brand page with a link with the brand as anchor text.

[AjiNIMC]

Sometimes it's clear how to link (e.g., by the title of the linked page), sometimes something different will better fit into context on the linking page. If you're lazy just use the exact URL.

Yeah I completely agree with you dirkz and I do that most of the time(by the title of the linked page) but sometimes I am a bit Lazy too. But what I want to know is does it has a negative side like getting a penalty or so?

If it has a negative point then I will have to change the whole anchortext.

Thanks
Aji

[ciml]

dirkz:
> I would write what seems appropriate :)

I agree, but although I'd prefer writing "the Google search engine [google.com]" I couldn't call a link to "google.com [google.com]" inappropriate.

I do wonder if "example.com" or "word1-word2.com" will be ignored in anchors one day. Given Google's current practice, a reduction in weight may be more likely than zero weight.

[trillianjedi]

I do wonder if "example.com" or "word1-word2.com" will be ignored in anchors one day

Eventually they will be forced to ignore it.

Bring on the day.

TJ