I started thinking about this as I came across a post on the NY Times Bits blog talking about online video and attention spans. The post talks about Hulu having its first birthday and mentions something about how the site was initially ridiculed. They link the word "ridicule" to an older post from their own blog.

Now when I mouse-over that link, I see that it goes to one of their own posts, and I wonder if they were the ones ridiculing it. Not that it particularly makes a difference to me one way or the other, but I was curious, so I followed the link, and it actually goes to a post that just mentions that people have been calling Hulu (which was not yet named at that point) things like "Clown Co." (who’s laughing now? But again, that’s another issue).

What I’m getting at is that when Bits links the word "Ridicule" to one of their own posts, it kind of lends to the connotation that they were the ones ridiculing Hulu, which given Hulu’s success, would make such a thing a little embarrassing.

I’m not trying to insult Bits. They just happened to have an example that caught my eye. In fact, it got me thinking about one of my own articles that I wrote a few weeks ago that mentioned people criticizing blogs as news sources. I linked to a post from a blogger who had written about another writer who was doing such criticizing, but the words I chose to link seemed to indicate that the blogger I was linking to was actually the one doing the criticizing. That blogger called me on it, thinking that I was actually was trying to indicate such, and seeing his point, I changed the wording of the link.

This is not something we often think about, but things like this could actually shed negative light (even if in a very minute amount) on those we are linking to, who deserve to be credited for providing the information we’re linking to. I think the "mouse-over" is taken for granted. People will see the URL for a link and sometimes decide whether or not they want to follow it based on that. Think about who you’re linking to, and show them the respect they deserve with your choice of anchor text. Even (and especially perhaps) if you are linking to yourself.

Aaron offers some really interesting speculation about why this may be occurring. The most interesting theory was the notion that it was an anchor text problem. Here is what Aaron had to say:

I think this issue is likely tied to a stagnant link profile with a too tightly aligned anchor text profile, with the anchor text being overly-optimized when compared against competing sites.

Whether or not this is occurring now, this makes complete sense. It is well within Google’s (or any other search engine’s) ability to detect an unusually high density of one form of anchor text to a given domain. For example, if your site is called yourdomain.com, and you sell widgets, and the anchor text in 48 or your 65 links says “Widgets on Sale”, this is not natural.

Most of the links to your site should be the name of your domain itself (i.e. in this example, “yourdomain”). Such a distribution of anchor text is a flag that the anchor text of your links are being artificially influenced. How is that done? Why by purchasing links, or by heavy duty link swapping.

This is potentially another step in Google’s stepped up war against the practice of link buying. I have long maintained that the main advantage the link buying has over natural links is the fact that people who buy links get to specify the exact (keyword rich) anchor text. used. Looking for unnatural patterns of anchor text provides a backdoor into detecting people who are purchasing links.

It might be a bit heavy handed for Google to ban a site based on this type of evidence, but reducing the impact of anchor text on rankings when there is an unnatural distribution in play still helps them meet their goal. After all, even if the unnatural acnhor text campaign does not represent the result of a link buying campaign, and all those keyword laden links are in fact completely natural, it might still provide better relevance for Google to filter in this manner.

Thinking about this further, this might be a simple search quality adjustment for skewed anchor text distribution. If it affects paid links, from Google’s perspective, this might just be a bonus.

Comments

One such conundrum involves anchor text and links. For SEO purposes, spiders dig it when the anchor text, for example, when you link to an article about bears, the text matches what it’s linking to.

However, humans, for better or worse, respond quite well to calls to action, and often need things spelled out for them, and need exact instructions on what to do. So – not to sound too condescending or anything – instead of expecting whichever visiting human’s synapses to fire in the right way to interpret that an article about bears highlighted in link-format is a link to that article, said synaptic misfiring human may actually need a "Click here to read about bears."

From an SEO standpoint, this is terrible. You’ve just optimized "click here," which is useless in search, instead of "bears," which is not.

Brian Clark, at CopyBlogger.com, says Google is "making people retarded" (Are we allowed to use that word anymore? ) as webmasters are not seeing "links as navigation for actual people to use; they only exist to pass on ‘juice’ according to an algorithm that no one fully understands."

Clark says that people actually click links more when given the exact action to take. That’s using an action word like "click" not "continue," because, apparently, that’s too confusing.

So, we’ve learned a couple of things: humans really are 98 percent chimpanzee; and that when optimizing, it might be a good idea to think of both your human and your robotic visitors, maybe linking both ways.   

Google Shows ‘Datalicious’ Anchor Phrases

Search conference attendees are familiar with Google’s Vanessa Fox, who frequently writes at the Webmaster Central blog. Her latest post described how Google will start giving webmasters a more complete picture of how sites link to them.

(For those of you who haven’t met Vanessa, why not take a moment to enjoy our video of her chat with Rand Fishkin at SES Chicago 2006? It’s Friday and you need something to do while waiting for the basketball games to start at noon, anyway.)

Vanessa described the benefit of their latest update to Webmaster Central like this:

Now we’ve enhanced the information we provide and will show you the complete phrases sites use to link to you, not just individual words. And we’ve expanded the number we show to 100. To make this information as useful as possible, we’re aggregating the phrases by eliminating capitalization and punctuation.

The move received applause from search expert Danny Sullivan, who discussed the change on his site. He compared the old, less useful way of showing a bunch of anchor words without showing their relationship.

“Keywords are mostly useless junk food data. Phrases are datalicious, tasty and helpful,” he wrote.

Anchor text has an important place for websites in indexes at Google as well as other search engines. Vanessa noted how “anchor text influences the queries your site ranks for in the search results.”

If a webmaster sees desirable anchor phrases bringing organic traffic into the site, it means the site has done a good job at presenting itself to the most desired visitors.

Less desirable anchor phrases, or a minimal presence of desirable ones, probably mean the site publisher needs to re-evaluate how it targets its niche for better performance.

There’s no reason to leave a better ranking on the table, especially with Google showing how it’s being built by the anchor phrases people create. After all, they’re datalicious.