An interesting post at www.webmasterworld.com outlines some of the most drastic changes in Google ranking in the last 3 months. Looks like Keyword Rich <a> tags may actually be hurting. To much of a good thing isn’t always good if you know what I mean.
Essentially, in an attempt to combat the ever growing link farming by SEO technicians, it appears that some calculations are being done concerning the types of titles and text within the anchor tags for inbound links. In cases were someone has a large amount of inbound links with similar keyword rich phrases, it would appear that they have been docked. This is most likely Google’s attempt to keep its inbound link ranking portion of the algorithm focus on a websites “web popularity”
So were does this take us? My initial response is to rethink any inbound linking terms and attempt to create a more diverse pool that represents more of an organic link. However, I think this points towards a growing trend in Google changes; a trend that we need to take note of in order to adapt.
Google is getting better and better at its original goal of making the internet search more and more accurate. So a strategy I’ve been using more and more is not to try to game Google but to rather build out websites that will be as useful as possible to the user demographics. Don’t get me wrong… SEO is not out the window, but rather ‘Information Architecture’ with a coating of SEO is key.
It will be interesting to see more of the old SEO tricks start to fail. I know of some crafty rivals that I’m keeping an eye on for this very reason. My strategy? A clean migration to a nice white hat SEO with a good content enrichment marketing plan. In other words…build a good site.
One comment so far.
This is this imaginary “position six penalty” that theyve now realised was real and due to an unexpected side effect or glitch isnt it?
but I agree, careful analysis of anchor text is seemingly becoming more and more important, as is varying it in realistic ways