Keyword Anchor Text Capture: The Experiment

Time for another experiment: how easy is it to capture very obscure keyword searches on Google? Normaly, Google searches on content, which is what a search engine should do. However, the way Google indexes its pages, and decides which ones are the most relevant, also depends on other factors. One of those is the anchor texts used to link to websites. Anchor texts are the words you see as a text link. These words do not have to contain real information about the website, they might also say something irrelevant like Click Here or something. So, although the anchor text does not have to say anything about the linked website, Google regards it as if it does.

On the one hand, this means that it is very important to always use good anchor texts when linking to your own websites. If you have, for example, a blog about Inflatable Elephants (just to name something), you do not want to use Stone Frogs as an anchor text, because it won’t help people find your page when they type in Inflatable Elephants. You also do not want to use Elephant, or Inflatable, as an anchor text, because these two things are so general that your page will end up on page 320 in the Google search results for these terms anyway, whatever you do (except if you really really put a lot of effort in it, then you might just reach page 230 or something).
So, to cut this too long story short, what you would want to do, is use the anchor text Inflatable Elephants. This is what your website is about, and this is a keyword phrase that is not highly popular, so you can compete on it, and rank high. Accidentally, this anchor text will also help your blog to be found when people use Elephant or Inflatable as anchor texts, and click on through to the 230th result page :-).

On the other hand, this means that when you choose some very obscure anchor text, like a combination of words that no-one has used before, and link this anchor text to a website that has nothing to do with it, search queries in Google for this phrase should show your website.

To test this, I will use a very nice and meaningless anagram of The Incredible Badger:

Glacier Indebted Herb

Well, I checked on Google, and there is no such thing in the searchable universe (hitherto). What I will do, is leave some links on different places on the internet, which have the above mentioned phrase as an anchor text. They will lead to a website having very little to do with any of the words in the phrase.

The experiment is to see if the website I use for the experiment will turn up in the search result for this phrase, although it has nothing to with it, and the words do not even appear on that particular website.

It should not really make a difference which website is used for this, because it is not the website that is being sought for, but the anchor text other websites use to link to this site. Thus, the website used for this experiment can be about anything irrelevant. Therefore, I will use one of my own websites, 70sDesign. It i s not like any normal person would use the above phrase to look for anything in Google anyway

This experiment could use your help: Place a link on your blog or website, explaining about the experiment (or without any explanation, if you like to confuse your visitors :-), and link to http://70sdesign.awardspace.com using the anchor text shown above (I do not want to repeat it the whole time, because Google will see this page as well, and thus it runs the risk of becoming the number one result for a search on the above phrase, making the whole experiment less useful).

Anyway, you can also easily see the outcome of this experiment by searching in Google for the above phrase. If 70sDesign turns up on top, it will be clear evidence that these anchor texts are important.

The next experiment then might by to try to ‘hijack’ some other obscure search terms which already have a few other (irrelevant) search results, and try to get on top. But that’s for a lter date.

For now, once again The Incredible Badger thanks you for your cooperation in this Internet Experiment about Anchor texts