Cyrus Shepard's Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text Whiteboard Friday back at the start of September inspired me to run an experiment. Cyrus pointed out that there has been some evidence to suggest that the exact match anchor text link may not be the holy-grail it once was. I wanted to test the theory out for myself though and try to delve a little deeper into the effectiveness of different kinds of links and also attempt to identify which link type is the most effective. I also wanted to get an idea of just how advanced Google is at recognising the context around a link, i.e. is it even necessary to include a keyword in the anchor text or can it process non-keyword, 'click here' type links if they are placed near to the keyword itself.
Before we get started, I want to say that my test was pretty small (three new domains, three mini-sites, 10 links to each) this means that by no standard are my findings conclusive but I think it definitely offers some food for thought and certainly some areas worth investigating further.
Phase #1 – Keyword selection
I was in the market, so to speak, for a keyword with relatively little competition. My logic being that this would make the test as clean as possible since the only competition would be the other sites within this experiment.
This would mean that we would be largely in control of other variables like on-page optimisation, domain age etc. offering us more of an indication of the impact that the different links were having. A "Laboratory SERP" rather than a SERP that's been plucked from the wild.
I settled eventually on the 'Orange Mega Sweets' because it was really low competition and I needed a keyphrase with at least three words to make the experiment possible.
Phase #2 – Domain purchase
The next step was to acquire three domains. I wanted three brand new domains so that no other factors were coming into play. I considered acquiring the exact match domain to see how it would rank compared with the above three but in the end decided against this as it wasn't really my intention with this experiment.
Above you will see a screenshot taken on September 13th 2011 detailing the hand registration of PurpleSweets.com, YellowSweets.com and BlueSweets.com. I decided on these three to ensure they were all equally relevant, similar lengths and of a uniform style – again to try and make this test as clean as possible.
I also paid for a new hosting plan to ensure absolutely no associations were made between these sites and my other websites. In hindsight, I should have gone further because I should have bought a hosting plan for each to ensure no association was made between the three test websites.
Phase #3 – Website Build
Very simple one-page microsites built on the latest version of WordPress with a standard WooTheme installed.
I made a couple of tweaks like footer attribution link removal, changed the homepage to display fixed content, linked out to a relevant Wikipedia entry to add some clout, made the title text based and added a keyword based tagline. I made the same on-page changes to all of the websites.
Body copy on each of these websites was again different (albeit similarly rubbish) and I also found a different image for each of the sites but kept the same title and alt tags for fairness.
Phase #4 – Linkbuilding
This part of the experiment was the most challenging. Deciding which types of links to acquire was certainly a difficult call to make.
In the end I went with a batch of 10 links for each of these three sites. I settled on some link sources which I happen to know index really fast (read – slightly too hot for client projects). Since this was an experiment, it didn't matter if the domains got burned.
(Link URLs masked to protect the sources - I know you can probably find them if you really want to!)
As you can see, with BlueSweets.com I built arguably organic looking links using non-keyword anchor text such as 'here' 'click here' and so on. My theory with this kind of link was that I wanted to test just how clever Google was at recognising the context of a link as these 'click here' etc. links were all placed within close proximity to the target keyword phrase 'orange mega sweets'.
With PurpleSweets.com, I went exact match anchor text crazy and finally with YellowSweets.com I kept things looking a little chaotic with a mixture of partial anchor text links.
To be as scientific as possible, I created links that were from very similar sources for each of the sites and I built 1 link at a time to each website – all links were completed and live within a 24 hour time period.
Phase #5 – The Results
Here are the rankings for each of the websites on day two of the experiment (14th September):
As expected, none of the sites ranked inside the top 50.
What about on 15th September though?
Interestingly, by day three of the experiment and only day two of these sites being live BlueSweets.com shot straight to number one for the target keyword. If you remember this was the site with the 'click here' type anchor text links.
It was a surprising start given that my feeling was non-keyword anchor text links probably lacked the relevance that Google was looking for but maybe I was about to prove myself wrong and perhaps Google has got smart at recognising the context around a link..? Nevertheless, my feeling that after just one day it was too soon to make any kind of judgement.
September 16th and BlueSweets.com had maintained its position - see screenshot below for Google.com accessed via a proxy.
By September 17th BlueSweets.com was still sitting at position #1 and the other two sites were still nowhere to be seen.
Later that day I ran the Rank Tracker again (yes I checked rankings twice in one day…) and things had really been shuffled:
Out of nowhere YellowSweets.com takes the lead and BlueSweets.com disappears off of the radar. YellowSweets.com is the website with a link profile consisting of partial match anchor text links.
The eagle eyed amongst you will note that the ranking URL was https://yellowsweets.com/p rather than the main URL – odd considering I mistakenly installed WordPress there for less than 5 minutes before I realised what I'd done, removed it and re-added to the root folder. If anyone has a theory on how Google managed this or why it happened...I would love to know!
I let things run their course for a couple of days and by 21st September, we see the following:
YellowSweets.com holds #1 and has an indented listing at #2. PurpleSweets.com (that has 10 exact match anchor text links) suddenly makes an appearance, dropping to #3 from #2 that it achieved just a day earlier (20th September).
Fast forward a week and the picture remains almost the same...
By 28th September, YellowSweets.com had lost its indented listing but the site remained at #1 with PurpleSweets.com sitting at #3. BlueSweets.com is nowhere to be seen.
Summary
Small Disclaimer
During this two week experiment, there was one occasion where SEOmoz's rank tracker data didn't match up to the rankings seen when a search was performed manually via a proxy.
Make of this what you will but my feeling is that this doesn't detract from the overall validity of the experiment because I was trying to identify patterns in a site's movement relative to each other rather than specific rankings on a given day.
What I learned from this experiment
Google isn't quite there yet
Google perhaps isn't quite there yet with their assessment of link context – the results of this experiment seem to suggest that Google still needs a hint and places a high degree of trust in the relevance of the anchor text (whether partial match or exact match).
The links built for each of these sites were from generalised sources and arguably from websites that weren't all that relevant. The pages these links were placed on however, made some of the right relevance & signals in terms of relevant largely handwritten content, a decent page title and no nasty paid links to bad neighbourhoods.
For this particular SERP at least, Google still appears to place a huge amount of importance on the anchor text of a link rather than the context or perceived relevance.
Partial match is the better long term strategy
Although YellowSweets.com was the slowest off the mark in this experiment, it made a steady rise to the top and retained its position. This indicates that partial match linkbuilding in practice is the safest in terms of long term stability and potentially also the more effective now and in the future (proving what Cyrus was saying in his ‘Beyond exact match’ WBF).
Think beyond the link
In the end it comes back to Cyrus’ closing statement – "Judge like a human". In practice, a link profile consisting entirely of exact match links doesn't look natural and is easy for Google in the future to de-value a huge proportion of your link profile in one fell swoop.
Assess link opportunities also as promotional, brand awareness and traffic opportunities and look at ways to build a presence online that will survive a future that is likely to be less about links.
Questions
- What made BlueSweets.com jump straight to #1? - And did this trigger some kind of warning/penalty that made it disappear?
- We know about penalties for over-doing exact match links so why did PurpleSweets.com escape unscathed? - It has a link profile consisting of 100% exact match links and no other directly competing site has this many exact match links for that keyword so in theory the site should stick out like a sore thumb.
- This leads me on to my next point that what results would we see in a different sector? - Google undoubtedly monitors some SERPs more than others so what would be considered a dangerous number of exact match links is relative to the marketplace.
I would like to end by saying that all links were built for test purposes only. If you do find the link sources (well done you) please keep them to yourself, I have started to remove the process of removing the links since the experiment has drawn to a close.
By James Agate, Founder and Director of SEO at Skyrocket SEO – a leading eCommerce SEO and Conversion Optimisation consultancy.
As an update to this experiment...bluesweets.com is now sitting at position 3 as far as I can see which somewhat reinforces the result of this experiment even though I stand by my judgement that more testing is needed (but isn't it always!) Anyway, I hope you all enjoy what is a thoroughly different piece from me - feel free to share your thoughts and feedback here in the comments!
Brilliant, useful experiment. Great work!
Brilliant work sir! I think this data say it all about Anchor link but besides this I must agree Cyrus statement that says ‘Judge like a human’. If we look beyond the links there are Humans we actually have to entertain and I think the best way to entertain is to look natural and people will start liking you!
Great Experiment!
I see Yellow, then Purple, then Blue in that order (1-3) all ranking for [orange mega sweets], which suggests that getting any links is good, links all with the same anchor text is better, a mixture is best. Which isn't surprising and confirms common wisdom, but the test was definitely interesting.
I think the short term changes are interesting, but I wouldn't dwell on them so much. It was curious to see those jump higher. One thing you can't factor is whether someone found these links on those other sites and clicked -- which Google might measure in various ways. The initial jump could be due to the fact that Blue had call to action links. So maybe people acted on that, giving Google an initial strong signal.
I was curious about a different search, for [mega sweets]. In that case, I get Yellow at #7 and Purple at #8 (in all cases, I'm using incognito mode in Google Chrome). I don't get blue in the top 50.
I like that search, because some of your links have anchors with "orange" in them, but some don't. This shows that a few "mega sweet" anchors are more important (as with Yellow ranking first) than lots of anchors that all say "mega sweet" in them along with another word.
One caveat to all this is that while it's clear (and appreciated) that you took great care in trying to fashion an experiment where all things are equal, they're not.
The copy on each site is different -- significantly different. The Blue site doesn't use the word "flavour" at al; the other two use it once or three times. Blue mentions its domain in the copy. The other two don't. These are just some examples. The actual content of a page is a ranking factor, also. Since these aren't exactly the same, that throws off the experiment.
This.
You could be right. When we check keyword density for "mega sweets" blue "mega sweets" title 40 body 4.7 h1 36.4 int links 23.5 yellow "mega sweets" title 40 body 3.8 h1 42.9 int links 23.5 purple "mega sweets" title 40 body 3.4 h1 46.2 int links 22.2 ...you'll notice that the blue site does have a much higher onpage keyword density (4.7%) well above the rumored 2% onpage keyword density threshold - this could also be why blue does not show up for the "mega sweets" search - alone or added to the spammy "click here" non context or semantics adding anchor text. But I think the links would play more of a role. The keyword density for each site on that search is not that dissimilar - the links seem to be the bigger factor.
Any thoughts on "Yellow" being semantically the closest to "Orange"?
If you're looking for an organge sweet, yellow would be the closest option of the 3 colors. Maybe it's coming down to content analysis and not anchor text.
That's a really cool thought Justin - thanks for adding that
Yes, that thought had occurred to me too, Justin.
Hi Danny,
Great to have your feedback on the experiment.
I agree about it kind of confirming common wisdom, but in a lot of ways I have become fed up with just settling for what is considered 'common wisdom' and I am committed to testing so much more stuff out.
That's cool to hear about your different searches around the keyword term and again that provides some more interesting insights.
I understand what you are saying about the copy and to be honest with you I am frustrated I left it like this because I toyed with several different variations at the start of the experiment to try and get things equal but like you say in the end that just didn't happen.
But "I live and learn" and as I pointed out, the experiment was never going to be perfect and I certainly never intended for it to be considered conclusive. I wanted to get some data out there and then develop the experiment/future experiments with input from the community.
Thanks again for taking the time to read the piece though and provide some very useful insights from your perspective.
Nice experiment, although I tend to feel that a test in a more competitive environment may work better. The reason I say this is because the keyword 'Orange Mega Sweets' is so uncompetitive that your sites are likely to rank high regardless of the linking methods. If you tested in a more competitive environment, you may be able to get a good indication of how the sites perform against REAL competition and you'd probably notice much larger differences in the rankings than the 1,2,3 you've experienced here.
Obviously you don't want something too competitive or it'd never rank, but I think there's some middle ground here that would yield more useful and compelling results.
Hi Shelly, agreed - I would like to test this in different markets and in different competitive environments, this experiment is really just the start of my research and I plan to come back in the future (time permitting) with some other useful data and real evidence.
My logic as I mentioned in the post was that I wanted a SERP where few factors were in play in a bid to isolate the impact different types of link have.
Thanks for your feedback though, always good to get another perspective
Congratulations! Great post!
With this experiment you've demonstrated that the best practice is to keep practicing all the time. The rule of proving & fail must lead us to be aware of all those minimal things we don't think about but that can spoil our efforts on achiving succesful SEO results for our website.
Thanks for your help, and good job.
Great words sir! Can’t agree more!
Regardless of fail, testing is really important as this helps us to identify the small things that we usually don’t consider and they really make a difference in our efforts…
True words Moosahemani, Testing is small thing but it's vital for any project. We need to consider those small things in a timely manner.
What an awesome experiment, James, maximum respect to you for doing this. I remember reading Cyrus' post and thought of doing it myself, but didn't have the time to execute it, so thank you for doing it.
I must admit, had a laugh when I performed a Google search and found www. orangemegasweets. com in the results, haha. Registered to Thomas Ballantyne.
Here's a screenshot from South Africa: https://cl.ly/252f3m050r0K1G31241z
Nice one!
I have just done the very same thing mate. Exact Match Domains are still powerful then...
was it this guy :)
https://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/225704
Good stuff. I love original data, and I like the "hybrid" approach of using real words but keeping them semi-nonsense, for lack of a better term. Sometimes, the old-style experiments with complete nonsense words and content, while arguably more controlled, are a lot harder to translate to real-world applications.
Obviously, it's just one experiment, and we can never completely separate ranking factors, but I think the goal of this type of work should be to add to the available data. All of these experiments have some value, once we add them up, and I'd love to see more people doing them.
Thanks Dr Pete...great to have you looking at the experiment and good to get some feedback from someone I personally look to for original data and tests! Also good to know you felt the content approach was largely sound.
I agree though, this experiment was never purported to be conclusive, I'm certain more tests are required and really what I wanted to do was get my thoughts and data out there so that with the help of the community I can kind of evolve and develop this experiment and future experiments (hopefully with a follow up post).
great experiment, been wanting to do something similar myself for sometime.
took a screen grab for you showing the current positions today: https://twitpic.com/6yel8b
i think a great follow up would be to see if mixing in the 'click here' type achors got the page ranking faster and kept it there.
thanks for that Joe - nice to see what other people are seeing in the SERPs also!
I'm seeing the same from here in Canada.
Just did the search in Google, yellow #1, purple #2 and blue #3. Interesting side question to this, why are none of these in Bing? I just checked the top 30 rankings, nothing.
I like the experiment. It shows you want to get the best of both worlds in anchor text. It's one thing to focus on relevant anchor text (exact match). Then another to focus on natural anchor text (click here). The best option is to focus on relevant, natural anchor text in your links.
I think this is an SEO best practice at this point. Lots of data from lots of people out there point to this being the ideal link building method. Great experiment and write up.
Thanks Dan - exactly, I had seen lots of articles around the subject but I just wanted to prove it to myself really!
Bing takes forever to pick up on new domains - I've seen it take several months in some cases. Submitting it manually seems to get it picked up more quickly though.
Jenni Brown has a good point here,Bing is not showing results just because Bing doesn't have any information about these domains.I had searched the whole URL in Bing but no exact result found.
Very interesting post, have seen similar things on my clients sites, varied mixture of exact, partial, brand and visit site / click here / etc seem to do well long term.
However would still say Google in particular, is still very fond of a high % of exact match link texts, with Yahoo + Bing responding a lot better to on page optimisation.
This sentiment would appear to match up to what Dan was saying early in this thread - as he points out, no visibility in Bing which is certainly very interesting.
Who is the orangemegasweets.com person and what can we all learn from them? ;)
Fantastic post James,
I think I can answer your questions:
- What made BlueSweets.com jump straight to #1? - And did this trigger some kind of warning/penalty that made it disappear?
For whatever rason, Google indexed BlueSweets first. This was probably due to the the backlink you built. One of the backlinks was probably picked up and sent to indexing first for this site. Since it then became the best match (as the other two were not indexed yet) it was shown 1st. It might also have to do with the cloud as perhaps in another part of the world another site was showing. You might want to check logs for Googlegot crawl times for those early days.
- We know about penalties for over-doing exact match links so why did PurpleSweets.com escape unscathed? - It has a link profile consisting of 100% exact match links and no other directly competing site has this many exact match links for that keyword so in theory the site should stick out like a sore thumb.
When there are few choices for the best match there is no need to filter out a site that is spammy on anchor text. Out of 3 good matches it still desrves to be shown. If there were 100 good relevance matches then perhaps it would get put into the supplemental index.
- This leads me on to my next point that what results would we see in a different sector? - Google undoubtedly monitors some SERPs more than others so what would be considered a dangerous number of exact match links is relative to the marketplace.
If there are a lot of quality sites competing for a keyphrase then you would expect the spammy one to perform worse than the "natural" one and the least relevant to perform the worst. This is what we are currently seeing with the three sites in your experiment. Just because all of the anchor text is the same doesn't mean the site should get banned. If there is no relevant anchor text (bluesweets.com) why should it outrank sites with relevant anchor text (all other things being equal)?
- The eagle eyed amongst you will note that the ranking URL was https://yellowsweets.com/p rather than the main URL – odd considering I mistakenly installed WordPress there for less than 5 minutes before I realised what I'd done, removed it and re-added to the root folder. If anyone has a theory on how Google managed this or why it happened...I would love to know!
I'm guessing you were using the Google toolbar on the same browser you were creating the site. The toolbar will send new URLs for indexing. /p got there first so Google creates the snippet with that URL. They must have rechecked the URL after the initial indexing and ranking and fixed it later. Google pulls one set of data in, works with it, and sometimes it won't recheck and fix the snippet for some time. For Google it's important to show new things quickly. I've seen snippets take a while to change so the snippet must be getting cached at different times to the ranking changes.
hey
nice summary :)
i've heard about penalty for new site for exact anchor link, what about if you get not exact anchor link?? like in yellowsweets anb bluesweets if he would get a 100 links from directories with this anchor would he also get penalised??
Brilliant post James, and great to see someone experimenting and trying it out, rather than just theorising or speculating on the subject.
Very interesting to see that anchor texts such as 'Orange' and 'Sweets' - which can be considered very broad head terms - help with the ranking, which is obvious and common sense I suppose, but might be difficult to justify building links to: try telling a client "we're going to build links to 'Sweets'" when 'Orange Mega Sweets' is what they're after, they'll probably think you've gone mad. But hey, if we can say that it'll help all related anchor texts in kind and there's evidence to back this up, then I guess they can't and shouldn't complain.
One thing I'd be interested to know is what lengths of anchor text help other anchor texts. For instance, all of your variations are shorter or the same length (1-3 words), but would 'Cheap Orange Mega Sweets' and 'Orange Mega Sweets Online' have the same effect or possibly a greater or lesser effect? Perhaps an excuse for another experiment...?
Hi Stevie,
That is a very interesting thought - I will add that to my list of potential directions to take this experiment in. Definitely keen to see it develop and see what else can be tested out.
Thanks for the feedback too!
Fantastic post, great to see someone's taking the initiative to prove what's on everyone's mind at the moment.
Really impressed with this post and I instantly went to explain it to the team!
Natural is definately the future of SEO practice.
Thank you!
I can only assume that orangemegasweets.com, which is now #1, was launched and built with no links pointing to it at all. Only relevant content and exact match domain. This was done to show the power of exact match domains (especially .coms). I can attest to this method being very effective for low to mid range competitive terms.
Great post and great job on the testing!
Very interesting experiment! I have to agree especially with your sentiment, "look at ways to build a presence online that will survive a future that is likely to be less about links." Links are incredibly important to SEO, but you shouldn't just focus on building up as many links as possible. There is more to SEO than that.
I think a big part to this would be a follow up post in another month or two to see if the results still stick and hold true. Great post.
RE: "Click here" site ranking highest first We see this effect with social sites... could the use or "click here" style anchors corrleate with usage on social sites? So google thought it was a trending social topic? Hence the near immediate posting,and the near immediate removal (when that "trend" was over b/c no one was clicking on it - it was below popularity threshold to preserve and rank long term social trends (?) That's my guess. Are the sites that linked to that site slightly more vistied, slightly higher PR? Did you do that one first? My other guess.
Very cool, I wish I had more time to run tests like this. I'm glad YOU did :)
Thanks,
From Google.es: yellow second, purple third and blue fourth. You do know that domain is first and this post is eigth :)
Searching to 'mega sweets': orangemegasweets is fifth, yellow is sixth, purple is eigth and blue is out of firstly 200+. I'm tired because I'm searching to fucking blue :P
Great post...!!!
Nevertheless, I have one experence with linkbuilding.
1. Publish one post with natural title and url in WP.org
2. Linking from six differents sources to same url with same anchor text.
3. Anchor text in natural and human, with seven words, 38 chars length and different that natural title of original post.
4. Later of 24 hours, Google show the original url in second page but with anchor text in title, NO with his original title :)
¿Do you know any similar issue?
Javier, if I understand correctly, your linkbuilding experience sounds like what was written about here: https://www.seomoz.org/ugc/distilled-stole-my-page-title-a-case-study-in-orm
Yes, this is similar issue. Learning every day!
Thanks u :)
I happen to come across this post today and looked to see where things still ranked after 8 months since you started, and over a month since the last commentor. Orangemegasweets still at #1, yellowsweets #2 and purplesweets #3 with bluesweets still not existent anywhere. Great test, I've always wondered ways to do some seo testing on theories for things that would not hurt my current stuff, thanks for the lesson.
**Also, everyone's probably going to laugh at me for this, but I was curious as to what kind of content you wrote for the test sites. When I clicked on the yellowsweets link and I got a trojan warning (which thankfully my antivirus caught).***
I am going to mark my calendar to check the ranks again next month to see how far google drops the site with a virus in it. I won't be clicking it though ;)
Very cool! Would be interesting to see how you could build on this experiment. Maybe some bulk vs quality testing would be an interesting next step. :)
Great post James, investigations and evaluations like this are vital pieces for both strong discussion content and effective search engine optimisation. Very interesting, and definitely forms a high-quality structure and platform for others to conduct their own experiments. Thankyou.
Good Work. Thats a really interesting test. I always try to use relevant anchors whenever possible but was always concerned that using the exact same anchor could be considered spammy.
In Ireland
OrangeMegaSweets.com is number one (shows the power of that domain for low competitive terms)
Followed by
Yellow, Purple, Blue.
It does give me confidence that using a mix of anchor terms is the best way to go..... if you cant get the .com!
It was a nice demonstration to show the importance of partial match link building , although we all crave for exact match, this experiment as well as the whiteboard friday post of seomoz have proved the conclusion and BTW searching for partial link building is easy compared to exact match! Hence if we make a 40:60 ratio of partial match:exact match linkbuilding, it plays a genuine link building! and Of course we all know that Non-keyword anchor texts are not good for SEO and genuine trust(for example , have you seen in many websites showing fraud like claims to give you gifts,money?or something which we can't afford to have and for that they give the anchor texts like --Click here Now etc.) hence these kinds of keywords are already red flagged and that's how,For a new website it may play a Red blood for their WebRep.
and BTW.. you are quite smart to remove those links but i found some of those .. but I won't reveal them just to ensure your Privacy.. thanks :)
Tried on Google UK - yellowsweets is #2, purplesweets is #3 and bluesweets is lagging behind at #8. Thanks for sharing your experiment.
This is what I see. Additionally, this blog is now on page 1 at position #10. I wonder how much is due to the process of link removal James referenced...
Really enjoyed this article, good work.
Yeah, I just checked and that's what I got as well.
Search results after Penguin: orangemegasweets at #1, yellowsweets #2 and purplesweets #4.
Bluesweet nowhere to be found.
What can we learn from this, trying to understand Penguin?
Great approach in this experiement and awesome analysis. Definitely interesting to read! I'm very curious to see what happens in the future to the keyword ranks for each one of these sites.
Great experiment! Interesting results that will definitely be useful!
Very valuable information Cyrus, however, things like how many of the links you created were indexed would also be a significant factor in the end results. Is this something you can update us on?
Would love to see the results in a month to month interval, perhaps you can also keep testing the types of links.
All in all, great article.
Great experiment!This article clearly demonstrates that the best method to achieve success is to keep on practicing. With numerous resources avaiable on the cyberspace about good SEO tactics, anyone mustn't ignore the importance of trying it out before fully grasping the technique!
Don't you think this test is invalid, at least more data is needed to justify its results. First of all, how many links were indexed by google on each date? Secondly, when each page got into the google's index? I bet bluesweets was the first one.
This is an amazing experiment! I tried to search the "Orange Mega Sweets" in Google, I found out that the result is exactly the same in your post. I am thinking how you manage to rank these 3 sites at the top of the Google just with 10 links? I think it might because of the inbound link that you built up for them. Thanks for the sharing!
very good and valuable post! Meany thanks!
to target the longtail and cover the different keyword combinations people tend to use when they are searching i think partial anchor text is the way forward. Exact can be let to the PPC gurus.
I see EMD wins?
Well explained about Anchor Text. Good follow! :-)
Yes relevancy of linking website is very important. It serves the long term objective of holding the keyword position. If links are coming from website which are not relevant, then the ranking of the keyword is sure to get decline as time progresses. Its true that search engine gives importance to relevancy, but it would take more time before it fully begin to regard the relevancy of links.
Gr8 job jamesagate. this seats well with the notion of alternating our link efforts and not just blindly link using the same keyword which is usually not really possible anyhow when doing a long lasting seo campaign.
It's kinda odd though that people are still doing their campaigns the old fashion way (Keyword Anchor text + totally unrelated content), when they already know for a fact what Google is trying to go for - to make sure that these links are made by REAL people. If it was me, I'd always go for the organic-looking click here's. IMO, Non-keyword anchor text is the future when it comes to link-building, given the fact that Google is getting better at recognizing organic content to the point that no one will be able to game it anymore, in the near future.
Great experiment. I'd like to think of something similar (and perhaps a bit more in depth) for a thesis. I think it's clear that diversifying anchor text is a best practice, at this point.
Actually it's more important what kind of text is around your link rather than what is anchor text.
Every now and then I too experiment with anchor texts, never went that far. Thanks for sharing!!
Excellent piece of work. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this test and at least clarifying this concept to me. Thank you very much!
A facinating experiment, involving partial match rather than exact match, and the www.user.com versus the https://user.com address urls. I have always suspected that one of these gets better treated than the other and that they might not be viewed the exact same way by search engines. Well thought out and very informative. This is why I love SeoMOZ!
Cheers!
Cassy.
Doesn't anyone find it strange that YellowSweets and PurpleSweets ranked rock solid from day 4 on forward while BlueSweets swung back and forth from day 1 until october 10th?
I see that the article's post date is october 11th, though the first comment (your own) dates october 10th. Is it possible that Google spotted your post somehow before october 10th?
I ask this in order to rule out that Google manipulated the results, as Google wouldn't like it if the SEO community perceived that non-relevant anchor text has a near-zero impact.
Probably a way to late comment to be read anyway :)
Fantastic post, it's always a struggle to not be tempted by those high volume keyword terms, and this is good supporting evidence for partial match.
If you don't mind could you please show an example of a partial matching anchor text ?
I guess what I will take out of this, it's important to vary your anchor text. Nice work!
We can put Anchor text with anchor links, but we must check also keyword density as well. most of people are use Anchor text as them business keywords. they people are think it is beneficial as per SEO point of view. Mostly it is beneficial but in some cases (non relevant links on non relevant data) it must be counting in spamming activity. Now we can check anchor text & anchor links with proper management.
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I agree, the experiment was done professionally. Thanks to people like James. Exact and partial matches still ROCK!
So just to add to this... I was the idoit that bought orangemegasweets.com, I tweeted a link and added it to my Google+ stream. I did no other link building. My observation was that within 1 day I was on the first page. A day or two later I was number 1.
No link building on my own part. The site has no authoritive links, minus the individual that called me an idoit and linked to my site in here.
Today the site ranks at #2.
That is my report.
Interesting experiment. I would definately concur with partial match being the better long term strategy. Good work!
As you said "Google isn't there yet..." which is good. This way it's possible to use this in your own needs to top your sites really quick.
Brilliant, useful experiment. Great work!
I really liked this good job. I shared it with my friends
Hii..really like your informative post,but here i have a confusion about 1 step in your post (The eagle eyed amongst you will note that the ranking URL was https://yellowsweets.com/p rather than the main URL)please explain if anyone can tell me,because i am also suffering from by this problem.
Excellent experiment here. Totally agree that partially matched keywords best work for rankings, and you're also protected to be noticed from competitive sites for some time. There is always possibility from being penalized if you to much pushing with links from beginning of campaign. If site is brand new, it is good strategy to build great content and don't hurry with too many links in first 2-3 months particulary. This can cost you penalization and many additional hard work in future to get out of sandbox.
Great tips thanks keep it up
I see other differences that might account for the positioning. Google has stated that size and position count in indexing and the KW phrase "orange mega sweets" is used with different text sizes, page positions, frequency, and tags on the sites.
While it *could* have been the linking that promoted the pages, it could also be other factors.
I would have liked seeing the test done with each of the pages getting ONE link, then adding the different links after a suitable period of allowing the SERPs to settle.
Ideally the one link to each site should be on the same page.
How do you reconcile the fact that Google says that links do not count for SERPs anymore?(EDIT: They say that they are not an actionable metric but are still one of the 200+ indexing signals)
best,
Reg
https://nbs-seo.com
Thanks for taking the time to do that.
I expected the results to be more similar than what they turned out to be honest but it looks like a mix of 'mixed' and exact anchor text is most likey the best method to get a realistic looking link profile with the best results.
Awesome, I always thought a proper mix of anchor terms will prove to be the best but never had a hold of concrete report. Your experiment proved it. Thanks...
Well works for me I've been using partial match for a while so that way the links seemed more organic, but none the less it's itneresting and it does make you wonder about BlueSweets. Is it possible that it just didn't have enough relevant links? Or that having zero keyword anchor text penalized it?
Excellent post, James.
Wanted to jump in real quick and respond to "odd considering I mistakenly installed WordPress there for less than 5 minutes before I realised what I'd done, removed it and re-added to the root folder. If anyone has a theory on how Google managed this or why it happened...I would love to know!"
It's been a while since I did a lot with Wordpress, but there used to be a built in feature to automatically ping the search engines when a new post is live. That's my best guess to how they found /p in the first 5 minutes.As to why it's ranking for /p -- I've have anecdotal evidence that it's a lot easier to get Google to stop by and index posts right away than it is to get them to update the index with a version that has my typo in the title and url corrected : )
great post
would an allinanchor search shed any light on what google ranked purely link wise?
appreciate its too late now though as you've begun to remove the links!
It was definitely a useful experiment, but I would be cautious about extending conclusions made for sites with no history ranking for low- to no-volume keywords to established sites ranking for competitive keywords.
This experiment confused me a lot. On the other side, it just proves that SEO is a "breathing science" which change constantly. My experiences are similar to experince of majoririty here, I suppose. So, I don't get it how G didn't penalized "purple sweets" which had nothing but exact match in anchor? And , for more strange situation, G ranked it AFTER penalising "Blue sweets" which were on #1 position for it's "non SEO" strategy with non-keyword in anchor text. All those various ups and downs seemed strange to me during reading of text, but end of article left me literally speechless!
I mean, could it be more organic and more google lovin then "yellow sweets"? Partial match in anchor always seemed like much better idea than exact match beacuse of possible penalizing, and obviosluy is better than non-keyword in anchor.Maybe you could extend your experiment and wait to see which website will go to sandbox, or at least untill new bigger panda update. I think that would give us some more answers...
Very Informative post. Thanks for the share. I agree to that. As long as you are doing some thing natural and not spamming just the anchor keyword it should be fine. It might take some time but results would be steady.
Thanks for sharing this info jamesagate, No doubt your experiment was good, i would like to add my personal experience which might be off the topic but I just want to mention as it could be of some help, while i was working with pervious company i did a test and manipulated the link building campaign. I started my link building campaign only for the home page but with category based anchor texts pointing towards my site's home page only.
After some days while checking the ranks I observed that all of those category pages were ranking with their perfect category keywords instead of boosting the home page ranking. My understanding is that your ranking signals and link juice moves according to your linking structure and ranks those pages which are more relevant for the anchored text.
In relation to Blue Sweets early appearance and disappearing act - I've heard anecdotally that this is not uncommon with sites new to the Google index and have indeed noted a similar phenomenon on more than one occasion. I don't know to what extent this is due to the links built, but suspect there may be other factors at play.
I agree there were probably other factors at play and although the Google Dance is common on new sites my curiousity was aroused because the other sites didn't appear to be so volatile.
Thanks for your positive feedback also - really appreciate it, a very different piece to my usual blog posts so wasn't sure how it would be received.
We'll get a follow up post right? I really enjoyed this post too, more please! :) Anchor text is a tough one, sometimes it feels like changing it up is actually counter productive, but partial match definitely seems like the way forward.
Hi Jenni, Definitely planning a follow up post, going to expand the experiment to look at different factors I think...
I love stuff like this. Thanks for doing this test. And please keep us updated if things change in the future!
Will definitely keep an eye on these sites to see how things work out long term!!
Your YellowSweets approach was one I took with a recent ecommerce site - I kept all the anchors related to the terms I was chasing but not exact match - the results are that we're top and near top for the terms I targetted.
Awesome post... keep 'em coming please!
Cheers Steve!
I am a new and learning SEO practitioner.
I just want to say... excellent, excellent, excellent post indeed.
I am following you on Twitter now.
Would like to share some insights and ask some questions,
Regards,
Talha
Good experiment .I ll say period of experiment and KW chosen is too short/easy to reach any conclusion.It should have been at least 3 months IMO.
But,good ground work for others to do same experiment.
I agree the KW were very easy to rank for but this was purely because I wanted to give the experiment the best possible chance of being fair i.e. we were testing only a small number of factors in this case the anchor text of links.
If I had picked another market with established competitors, then we'd be looking at all sorts of variables involved. Although this experiment likely didn't test just the one variable (this would be impossible) I feel like I got as close as possible.
Agree with you Ryan though that more testing is certainly required.
It would be cool, although a lot more difficult to arrange, to do a test of domains that had been around for say over a year.
A brand new domain bombarded with exact match anchor texts is a pattern that might be a safe bet for the search engines to filter out. (Though that statement is purely conjecture)
Congratulations! great experiment!
Screenshot google spain google.es (October 11th, 2011)
https://img840.imageshack.us/img840/561/orangemegasweets.png
Thanks Jorge - it is great to see all the different SERP screenshots from individuals around the world - very helpful and interesting indeed!
I love the layout of this article. At first glance it looked more like an essay, but with the visuals you really do get sucked into your story. Nice experiment.
Wow! This is incredible! Thanks for taking the time to run this experiment and write the article. The Google dance is a curious thing.
Interesting.. Thanks for the post
Great Experiment! Thank you!
Great Experinet as all said, but always variation makes the differnce like yellow sweets domian..
Thank you! Very useful!
Great post with great experiment
thanks for sharing such good experiment
Excellent post - one of the most thorough experiments for a while. Would have been interesting to see the effects of OrangeSweets.com with the 'click here' anchor text. That could be volume 2!
Proper SEO will always boost the website to get the traffic and well as the targeted users profile.Bing doesn't match the match this domain I have researched.So good topics with some unique info.
I personally prefer the mis match...
Great article. Natural has been the approach for some time but good to see this proved in a completely transparent way.
great post. I love when people experiment and explain data in a simple but effective way.
it's really strange what happened with purplesweets. I mean, I have the same problem with an important keyword, but at the beginning we push too much the keyword with exact 1-word anchor text that apparently Google gave me penalty for this. So I'm doing LB without that keyword and see in how much time I'll recover for that.
I think best way is to do LB in a more natural way, like you do for yellowsweets. It's good for sure for the user , and I think it's good even for google too, in a long term.
thanks again for the great post!
Just waiting for Google to black list the sites for link building!
Something to note, as this is not a competitive space, it is difficult to see the "distance" between partial, exact and no anchor text.
Interesting, but nothing to change what I am already doing. Afterall, the anchor text is for the user too, if it says "click here", it could just as easily say "Blue mega sweets - click here".
Also, I see different results many times depending on the browser I use.
Like a Chaucer novel, I just couldn't put this down and had to read it all. Fantastic experiement and even better documented. Well done, Sir!
Hey,
its a great expriment.... great part of the contain is about keyword selection, domain selection & link building...
thanks for sharing..
Congratulations for the brilliant article,Your experiment is really a great positive proof for the Cyrus article.It really lovely to see how partial match are working so effectively and I am wondering that anchor text link for click here also work this good.Really we should develop a strategy by which we can get instant results with non-keyword anchor text and keep them stable with partial match.
Great Article :)
Some idiot did buy https://www.orangemegasweets.com/......:/
And You did use other wikipedia link on bluesweets.com- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy
an on yellow and purple you use : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_%28colour%29
So the second link is much more relevant to what keyword you want to achive....
really idiot? who is going to buy orange-mega-sweets.com? Just curious to know and it is cool to be here :)
Good work.
But it is proven once more by my competitor – 1000 back links from hacked domains to a keyword farm are more valuable for Google then a page with valuable honest content.
Let’s face it. Who on earth links to their ‘favorite’ web pages apart of site administrators!? Perhaps in naïve nerd’s 90's links were matter. But today? Page rank is a friend only to content thieves, spammers, corporations, not honest business. And to survive you have to cheat and make sh*t. And now everyone sit in it. Is this what you want, everyone... Google ?
I just joined this site and I must say that I have learned more here regarding SEO in the last 30 minutes then in some trainings that cost me thousands of dollars. Keep upt the great job!
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