Forum Moderators: martinibuster
But I have audited the incoming links of 10 clients. I use a backlink analyzer that dumps backlinks into an excel spreadsheet. I can see the link text for each link quite easily. (Each client as at least 150 links, all "natural" in that the client didn't acquire them through SEO but rather brand awareness).
What I am seeing is that about 90% of the link text is *exactly the same*. What is it? It's the name of the organization.
Natural link text is often exactly the same text.
So what is natural and what is artificial?
>>The most natural anchor text is "click here" or the URL.
Perhaps Google knows this and takes it into account. ;)
Ha! Only if you really want to rank well for the phrase "click here" in the SERPs. Just one more reason why I think this heavy emphasis on links in determining ranking positions is inherently flawed. I realize there isn't an easy answer, and that's fine, but I wish people would stop pretending that one form of anchor text is more 'natural' than another. They're ALL predicated on what the SEs need for their algos. How much more unnatural could it get?
If some people are smart enough to belatedly figure it out in 2006, I'm sure the brains at Google thought about it years ago, at least from the time they started monkeying around with Update Florida.
Talk to the link people at Google at pubcon (I make a point of it) and you'll get a better idea of what's going on.
Like I said in my previous post, the search engines may no longer be relying on a single metric all by itself, but looking at other signals to corroborate it.
Read the interview with Aaron Souza of Google from SES NY over at serountable. Check it out, lots of good info.
pageoneresults in message 4 boils it down perfectly. People like your site and throw a link to it, out of the blue.
