Google’s Take on Anchor Text

There are many aspects to obtaining high search engine rankings and one of these is the anchor text that you use. The aim of this article is to look at how Google take your anchor text into account.

First let’s consider what anchor text is. Basically this is the text used in a link to your website and what people will click on to get to your website. How this affects your ranking is easy to understand. If you place the words "Pink Dots" in a large number of links to your site the chances are you will have a high ranking for the term pink dots.

I have recently been reading an article by Axandra about some research done on the length of the anchor text that is optimal and it provided some interesting results. They were looking at the outcome of a test done to determine how long your anchor text can be before Google begin to ignore the anchor text you use.

The Test

The test was conducted by Shaun Anderson who set up a text link that included 50 nonsense words. Each of the words that was put into the text link was constructed to be 6 characters long. Below is an example of the type of thing that would have been constructed:

gekszi gosbfs rd3o5s 9tf9s4 fi3j4s j3i4n5 jriant jeu4j5 giw03n .....

This link was then set up to link to the home page of a website that already had a good ranking in London. Shaun then waited a little bit of time for Google to pick up this link and then did a search. He used a term that he already new the site ranked highly for and then added one of the nonsense words on to the end of the term. This would then result in the situation that Google would only list the site in its results if there was a link to it containing the selected nonsense word.

To take an example, consider a website that ranked number one for the term "Website Development Company" then when the term "Website Development Company gekszi" was searched for the website should show up.

The results

All of the words were tested individually to see if they showed up in the results. Out of the 50 words that were added in the link only the first 8 showed up in the Google search. None of the words after the first eight showed up. This lead Shaun to draw the conclusion that the maximum length of any link should be 55 characters. This was determined by the fact that Google counted 8 six letter words, 48 characters plus the spaces making 55 characters.

This is a fairly good assumption to make, the only thing to consider as an extra is whether Google counts characters or words. If it is words then we could say that the maximum length of any link should be 8 words.

What Does This All Mean for You?

Think about the links that you create to your site and try to keep them to a maximum of 55 characters to ensure all your keywords are picked up.

It is also important to remember that many sites that link to you will use your page title for the anchor text. Focus on your website titles and ensure they include your major keywords, especially near the beginning. This will not guarantee you top rankings but it will certainly prevent you from spending time doing things that will not benefit your site.

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