Google and Anchor Text - March 28th, 2008
Recently i have been looking into how Google treats anchor text within a page and came across some interesting findings, Through controlled experiments people have discovered that Google could be disregarding the anchor text on a page used to link to say page A if there is already a text link on the same page linking to page A. Confused? Let me explain.
You have a menu on your website and it links to a page that sells blue widgets and red widgets. In your menu the link text is “Blue widgets” further on in the page you are talking about what your website offers and you link to your widgets page but you use the anchor text of “Red Widgets”. It has been suggested through experiments that Google will not use the second anchor text to give weight to that page for the keyword used. Google will only recognise one link to a page from the same page so if you put many links on one page to another then Google will only count the first link in the code and use the anchor text for that link.
One way to overcome this is to use the nofollow feature of links. If you can?t change your menu to use your keywords then if you nofollow them then it will not use the anchor text used.
Remember though this was only an experiment. Personally i hold reservations about these findings because if you have a page on your website you want to optimise then you will have it in your menu (which is on every page), these findings would mean that there would be no point in having any links in your content to any page in your menu structure because Google has already got the link to that page from your menu unless you nofollow your menu. As we know from being a successful SEO company this simply doesn?t seem to be the case, having a good internal linking structure benefits a site but a good internal linking structure isn?t just a menu on a page.
Gary
NSEO Programmer
