The Power of Anchor Text

[first posted alt.internet.search-engines on 26th of March 2005]

Problem

I was searching Google using the keywords, surf shop:

http://www.google.com/search?en&q=surf+shop

and in the top ten I found a site: www.surf-shop.com. I don't understand how that site could be on the first page for the keywords.

Analysis

The site shows poor on-page optimization, it is a keyword stuffed frames site and there is no TITLE tag (which is incorrect HTML), in addition the Google link: operator:

link:http://www.surf-shop.com/

shows only a single inbound-link. It does, at first, seem to be a bit of a mystery.

Lets look at the competition for the SERP. There are 4.8 million results for the keywords: surf shop, this is a reasonably competitive search. However if we restrict the search to the title element (which incidentally, eliminates our badly coded site) we get only 100,000 results. If we put the search string in quotes, an even stronger indication that the website is competing on those keywords:

intitle:"surf shop"

we get only 36,000 results, less than 1% of the original total. Now if we look at how many of those sites also use the keywords as anchor text in inbound-links:

intitle:"surf shop" inanchor:"surf shop"

We are left with just 4000 websites, this is the real competition for the SERP. Just 0.1% of the orginal figure.

Our site has a toolbar PageRank of 4, this seems a little high for a site with a single inbound-link. It seems that Google is not telling us the whole truth. If we check with Yahoo! we actually get around 40 inbound links. Because most linkers are lazy they often just use the domain name as the link text but because the keywords: surf shop, are used in the domain name and hyphenated this should mean most of the inbound-links also use strong anchor text.

Many of the inbound links were on link exchange sites. This means that the PageRank is divided over a number of outbound links. However the link exchange sites are strongly themed on surfing and may even class as Google authority sites. Although the transfered PageRank is not great if we search with SEO Chat's PageRank search tool:

http://www.seochat.com/

We see that the competition only ranks 4 or 5 so the good anchor text is the clincher.

The Power of Anchor Text

Problem

Analysis

See Also