Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Over time the site has crept up towards page one in Google search results for what I would call an impossible term that has over 150 million competing pages. As I write this it stands at #24, which means no real extra traffic from since thats page 3, but I've found a pattern.
If the most recent 10 incoming links to the site all have the impossible keyword as anchor text the site seems to move upwards a spot or two and when they don't it drops a spot or two. Now 10 links is insignificant when compared to the thousands it already has but the trend makes me wonder...
Does the keyword anchor text of the most recent incoming links influence which keywords a site ranks best for slightly more than older incoming links? It seems to in this case.
As a general rule, backlink anchor text is a fuzzy area. Google knows, statsitically, what the common variations are for anchor text. Especially outside the blogosphere, the anchor text is often going to be the domain name or the site's name without any extension. A backlink profile that is way too low in those kinds of anchor text is going to stand out as possibly manipulated by the site owner.
But some spot-on keywords in anchor text can be a signal of quality and relevance, especially when a variety of websites are linking to a specific article on an interior page.
Note the "may." I think from my experience other qualifiers are needed. One fresh link may do nothing; however, several fresh links may do something. How much weighting a fresh link offers often seems negligible, esp. in a competitive environment.
"Links may also, or alternatively, be weighted based on the freshness of the documents containing the links using some other features to establish freshness (e.g., a document that is updated frequently (e.g., the Yahoo home page) suddenly drops a link to a document)."
If memory serves, Google tries to detect whether freshness in any given situation is clearly relevant.
"The freshness of anchor text may also be used as a factor in scoring documents."
On the flip site, old backlinks can be great, esp. from trusted, authoritative sites. Some webmasters feel old backlinks are like wine; they get better as they age.
See the Link Development forum for more related discussions.
p/g
the anchor text is often going to be the domain name or the site's name without any extension.And thats why I bought a few domains for several thousand dollars! However, I've noticed my internal pages have much more backlinks than my front page.
JS_Harris: I rank top 3 for a Keyword with over 1.5 Million Google search results. The keyword brings over 1000 visitors/monthly. I only have one backlink from a .edu website for that term. And the backlink is not that new either.
The freshness of anchor text may also be used as a factor in scoring documents.I think the freshness of the content counts as well.
Another thing I learned is the amount of traffic coming from the backlink counts as well. I have another website that ranks low (PR 2/10) and almost 0 Google traffic, but gets decent traffic (I paid for the traffic) from other sites. I added a link from the front page to another website and I noticed the site gets decent Google traffic.
Another experiment I have done recently is BOLD the anchor text from the .edu website I manage. My rank has gone up a bit, im not sure if its the boldness of the anchor text that effects my ranking OR the amount of referrals I get now that the text stands out that has SEO effect.
thats my 2 cents on SEO
