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SEO: The Importance of Anchor Text in Backlinks
Posted by Scott on 17th October, 2007 | 24 commentsAfter I met with Matt Inman at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose and saw his amazing success with his linkbait quizzes, where he was able to push mingle2.com (now justsayhi.com) up to the #1 ranked position for keyword “online dating” in Google (above Match.com and eHarmony), I started reevaluating my own backlinks, linkbait, and SEO practices to see if I could produce a similar result.
First up, I took a look at our PhotoPost business. PhotoPost is a PHP/MySQL photo gallery that any website owner can install on their site to add a social/community gallery complete with uploads and discussions. About 9,500 sites run PhotoPost, at at the bottom of every one of them is a “Powered by PhotoPost” link back to http://www.photopost.com. Trouble is, “Powered by PhotoPost” is a really stupid phrase for anchor text given that Google assigns so much importance to that ranking factor. No one searches for “powered by” when they’re looking for a gallery, they search for photo gallery, photo sharing, and the like.
I did some keyword research and decided that “photo sharing” was a killer phrase that would be hard to rank for, but I decided to give it a shot. I couldn’t instantly change the link text on every PhotoPost customer site, but we were about to launch PhotoPost 6 which meant that many customer sites would be upgrading, in which case they would be switching over to the new anchor text, “Photo Sharing Gallery by PhotoPost”(scroll to bottom of this customer site for an example).
Before the anchor text change, PhotoPost.com ranked 175 in Google for “photo sharing”. A few weeks later, it’s now at 51 and rising every day. Many existing sites upgrade to the latest version of PhotoPost with the new anchor text every day, and we get many new customers each day, so I’m hopeful that this will increase enough to land us on page 1 eventually.
Next up is Danasoft.com. Danasoft is a sneaky sign widget thing that I acquired from a friend years ago. People put the Danasoft image in their signatures (for forum posts), in blogs, and in their myspace profiles, to freak people out. When you see the sign, you see your IP address, browser, host, etc, and we have a new sign that shows your city location (the city one is shown below), but your info/location is never shown to anyone but you nor is it tracked or stored. People can create their own custom signs with custom messages on the sign and thus far 900,000 signs have been created. The signs are viewed about 2 Million times per day.
Sign by Dealighted - Coupons & Discount Shopping
Up until a few weeks ago, the danasoft.com homepage just displayed the image for people to copy, but with no link back to us. People would find us by right clicking the danasoft image to see its source or by reading the “danasoft.com” title text that’s shown on the sign. I just knew that there was some way to use this as linkbait if only I could get people to link back to us instead of just hotlinking the image. So, on danasoft’s homepage, I added a pre-filled textarea box with code that people could copy and paste into their blog or website. And wouldn’t you know it, that code included a text link back to our Dealighted.com site with the anchor text “Sign by Dealighted - Coupons and Discount Shopping”. There are now quite a few people using this pre-fab link code and Dealighted’s Google rank for “discount shopping” increased from 100+ to 11. One more position and we’ll be on page one at Google for that keyword pairing.
How can you use this info? Identify a keyword pairing that makes sense for your site (use the Overture tool, Wordtracker, etc), and ask people to use that text when they link to you. It will make a difference over time. Course, if you can come with some kind of cool widget, image, quiz or something that people will instinctively stick on their blogs and myspace profiles, and provide them with a prefab code block that contains your desired anchortext, that works too.
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Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 7:01 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Time for me to get thinking and creating a cool widget
How do you do the link in the textarea box? I think in many forums BBCODE is used and html is not allowed, even simple html such as A tag.
In BBCODE to make a link the syntax is [URL=http…]Your text[/URL]
Thanks again for the useful information you provide! Been seeing those ’sneaky’ signs all over the place.
Yet again sound advice seeps from the pages of WRevenue.com. Title tags on linking is key…linking in general is key!
Hi! This has nothing to do with the post but with the website. I just subscribed and I think that you have some great content. It’s good stuff. don’t give up =)
Excellent information and well written blog. This post made me rethink my back linking strategy for one of sites. Btw, I came by your site via Chow.
Great info, thanks!
By the way, I’m a PhotoPost customer of yours, and I’m loving the script so far.
Wow! This certainly opened up our eyes to what is possible. Now we just have to think of something viral that everyone will want to put on their site/blog and make sure it links to us. Hmmm…
Nice post. Good info
How did you create danasoft.com?
“How did you create danasoft.com?”
I actually bought it for a small sum from a friend several years ago. He didn’t know how to monetize it and didn’t have time to run it. After I bought the site, I added Adsense and partnered with a company called Aptimus to insert paid email subscription offers as step two of the custom sign creation process. I’ve since removed aptimus in order to maximize the viral/linkbait value of the danasoft sign and because Aptimus stopped generating as much revenue for unknown reasons.
The sign itself is generated in real-time by a PHP script. The script uses a geo IP database to lookup hosts and cities, and uses the PHP GD library to create and print out the sign as an image.
cool…widgetization is the simplest and the oldest technique…r u now wing ur revenue?
But don’t you think that we are scaring away innocent visitors by putting across those signs…
This is a great blog. I have learned alot from it already. I hope you manage to continue the motivation to keep it going.
With my own websites’ redesigns long overdue, along with the clients for whom I design, I’m always eager to learn about new and creative ways to monetize and provide real SEO value to those sites.
Looking forward to more tips-of-the-trade (from someone who knows the real 411) and insider info.
“But don’t you think that we are scaring away innocent visitors by putting across those signs…”
Well, danasoft is just an example. I encourage you to create your own widgets/images/quizzes that people will want to stick on their blogs/myspace pages.
Great article. Keyword anchor text is important. I will definitely think of a shareable widget for gaining back links.
Inspired again….I know where I will be once a day….keep adding Scott!
Holly
[…] an excellent article on the topic of anchor text Tags: Advice, Search Engine Optimization Tips, pagerank, search engine optimization, […]
One thing to think about is that google likes natural back links. With your photo sharing widget, you receive many duplicated links with the same anchor text. Google might take this as a way to manipulate it’s search results and consider your site spammy.
Excellent advise!
Hey Scott,
Isn’t it true that Google bans site with applying same anchor text to a lot of sites? Like “internet marketing” is hard to get no. 1 on Google. And all my anchors add internet marketing pointing to my site.
As reported on a few sites they lost their rankings and been currently banned from Google’s index.
Am I correct or I missed it?
Thnx for the reply,
Hrvoje
P.S. Great blog. Just I miss more posts :-).
Scott:
I am goin to implement this strategy.
One question: how to you go about promoting the viral tools at initial stage so that people start usin it?
thanks.
CY
It helps to have another site you can use to promote to ventures. Otherwise, if it’s a similar gimmick (such as quizzes, signs/graphics etc), you can add them to your own myspace page, put them in the signature of all your forum posts etc, and people will take notice and start using them if they’re cool.
well, Mingle2.com was just punished again by Google for their type of link baiting. I feel badly because I was tempted to do this but was warned to take the slow and steady approach!