Google - Anchor Text Not So Important Anymore?
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008Interesting article by Patrick Altoft - he reckons Google may have reduced the weighting it gives to anchor text in its search engine algorithm.
Anchor text is the text that appears in website links. In other words, instead of simply displaying the URL of a given website, you might provide some descriptive text - this is known as anchor text. As an example, “http://www.kikabink.com/news/” is the straight URL of the home page of Kikabink News. But if I wanted this link to appear as “Internet marketing newsletter” I would write “Internet marketing newsletter” as the descriptive or anchor text.
According to Mr Altoft, anchor text is the “biggest flaw” in the Google algorithm. He believes that anchor text has no relation to trust for most queries.
“Just because a site has 5 million links with the anchor text ‘loans’ doesn’t mean its a good search result for the query ‘loans’. Currently there are two types of sites ranking for commercial queries - ones that rank due to the TrustRank of their incoming links (links from newspaper websites and quality blogs) and ones that rank because they have thousands of paid links with keywords in the anchor text.”
At this stage, the under-weighting of anchor text is just a theory… but certainly an interesting, and possibly valid, one.
Source: Patrick Altoft , “Google Changes Algorithm - Anchor Text Less Important”, BlogStorm, August 22, 2008
