Short titles are better for backlink building?
This post made my eyes pop out: Google favors anchor text links of 55 characters or less for link building. We have noticed that from our own linkbuilding efforts that shorter text titles get picked up more often by backlink tools. Caveat: just because the link doesn’t appear on a backlink tool’s results doesn’t mean Google doesn’t count or follow the link (assuming you built on do follow blogs/sites).
During a recent campaign, we compared two clients–one had a very short (12 characters) keyword text link. The other client had a longer (31 characters) keyword text link. While we managed to get the latter client from deep within the bowels of Google to the top of the third page after three weeks of work, the first client enjoyed a nice jump from way past page 10 to the middle part of page 1. Coincidence? Pretty much same link sources, linking methods, and link timing. One key difference (besides niche), the length of anchor text.
This seems nice to know and everything but, as many webmasters can attest to, sometimes it’s the super long keywords that deliver the better ROI.
So… if this tip works for your niche, definitely give it a try. However, if your niche favors long keywords, I’d say stick to what works best.
Photo credits for Dwarf warrior
Well.. Based on the information given above, it seemed that you have not tested it well. You used two (2) websites that operate on different niche which has different competitive environment.
It would be much reliable if both websites do operate on same target niche or keyword.
Charles Palma’s last blog post..Business.com | Business Directory Online
I am not arguing against the results you found, but if Google really does that, it seems very illogical. If you use longer search terms, you typically get more relevant results.
For example, “Illinois business attorney” is going to get more focused results than “business attorney” which in turn gets much more focused results than just “attorney.” If Google treats the keyword text link “attorney” more favorably than the longer text links “Illinois business attorney” or “business attorney,” the outcome will be less useful results for users.
A short anchor text is better for ranking on the related keyword text while a longer anchor text offers ranking on additional keywords.
Ex. As for ranking on the “adventure travel” keywords, the short anchor text “Adventure travel” provides a better ranking than the anchor text “Adventure travel to South Africa”.
But, the latter provides also ranking on keywords such as “travel south africa”, “adventure travel south africa” and “adventure south africa”.
This is really useful information, especially with my blog where I try to keep the length of my titles as short as possible.
Jake Rocheleau’s last blog post..Interview with Digg-Clone for Designers DesignBump
@Charles Fair point. Our case study is a rough test. However, check out the link we cited in the post.
@David Agreed. It does seem illogical. It might be a technical issue with Google.
@jass It totally depends on your niche. Some niches are BY DEFINITION long tail keyword niches.
Ok. I agreed both positive and negative points here. But my doubt is about the internal keyword density and the inner pointing urls within the site. How about them?
Our SEO guys suggesting us to add some bold keywords list at the footer section to increase the popularity of the density. Is that a good decision or not.
Thanks for your answers in advance.
Note: Please delete my previous post. There was an error in the name
Ok, so after all what has been said, i think that google will never stay the same, they change algorithms very often, from what ive heard, so ive got a question, does it matter to google if the keyword ur trying to position is very competitive?
It seems to me that Google’s whole intention is to simply make link building hard for the little guy’s. I can’t think of any other reason for them to ignore long tail keywords if they are relevant to what people are searching. All I see is them giving established sites the traffic from those longer tail keywords even if my the newer site is 100 time more relevant to what the end user wants. It’s not fair but what can we do?