End of anchor text
A long time ago it became apparent that google relied heavily on anchor text - that is, the words that were used in external links to a site. So if I wanted to rank high for ‘great SEO blog’ I would make sure that people linking to the site used that text in their link (rather than ‘click here’ or ‘bigtangle blog’, for example.
This approach has worked for a number of years.
But recently it seems likely that google are paying much less attention to anchor text - predictably, perhaps, given the number of webmasters buying links with their chosen text.
With ‘normal’ links of course the webmaster has no control over the anchor text used, which is more likely to be ’see this blog for details’ or the examples i used above, rather than correct anchor text.
Originally google used the anchor text a great deal because they can’t rely on the text of the page itself - otherwise I could include the words ‘great SEO blog’ a few times in the text, even if I didn’t have one…but things have moved on. They are much better at identifying patterns in words, the general subject of a page, keyword density etc and generally identifying whether a page is really about what the author claims.
In conjunction with links to the page from pages on related subjects they can now pretty well tell whether a page should score highly, regardless of the anchor text. Evidence on our sites would seem to suggest that those having many links with the same ‘correct’ anchor text have slipped a little in the results, while more genuine pages, with natural links, have done rather well.
Conclusion? External links are still very important, make no mistake. But be very cautious not to have too many with the same anchor text - there are significant risks from penalties if you have too many links with the same anchor text. Try and get a couple of ‘correctly worded’ links to set the idea about the page subject, but after that don’t worry too much what the links anchor text says, worry more about whether the content is compelling reading.