Monthly Archives: October 2011
A Follow Up – Partial is the new Exact Anchor Text Link.
Anchor Text Linking
An experiment on which type of link anchor text is most effective was carried out by jamesagate and it is very interesting. He set up 
three sites, same keyword phrase used for each site, the domains being similar but not the exact match keyword phrase used in the domains, just used on each site.
The keyword phrase was a low competition phrase too.
James used certain criteria which he explains in the article on Seomoz.org.
The anchor text links were the generic ‘click here’ for one site, the exact match for the second and the partial match for the third.
He used ten links to each site.
When I searched for the keyword my results were the site with the exact keyword in the domain comes up in #1 spot. Then the experiment sites were #2 #3 #4 using the search from iGoogle.
Using Google Australia, the results were domain exact match in #1, then the sites were #2 #3 and #5.
Using Google US Exact match Domain #1, the experiment sites were #2 #3 #4
Using Google UK Exact match domain #1 then experiment sites were #3 #4 #9
The site positions were always in the same order, partial, then exact, then generic.
When I searched, the thing that I noticed with the search results, was the description of each site.
The exact domain (which wasn’t part of the experiment) had the keyword phrase as the first wording in the description so did the exact anchor link site and also the partial anchor link site but the generic didn’t have that keyword phrase as the first wording in its description.
Yet looking at the source code, the title and description of each site is the same. I haven’t gone through it with a fine tooth comb but will take a closer look.
We mostly go to some effort with the description of our sites because once getting the site into one of the top 5 search results it is that description that will entice someone to click on your site as opposed to the others.
I’m curious now as to why those descriptions didn’t all come up the same. Why did Google select differently for one site.
It is interesting…..
The link for the experiment post is below.