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Internal Linking and Anchor Text
Author: Ryan Ward | March 4, 2008I’ve been doing some testing recently to test the effects of different anchor text on internal linking and whether or not it affects SERPs for targeted keyword phrases. My Atlanta real estate website was created when I knew absolutely nothing about SEO. Admittedly, today I am still quite the amateur, but, I have been learning and testing and some of it has been very helpful.
Each internal link in my main navigation used to say “city real estate” and it made the navigation bar look cluttered, but, I was afraid to change it for fear of losing rankings. So I changed one link to only “city” and waited…and waited. After about a month (plenty of time for everything to be recached, my position did not change in the search engines.
I would never recommend something that I have not tested so before writing this post, I changed a few more of the navigation links and found the same result - no change in position in the search engines.
The one caveat here is that I am only speaking of results in Google.
So, if you were curious, but, afraid to make a change, I can tell you that my experiment and testing showed that it did not affect rankings. Perhaps Google is simply smart enough to see the internal linking and follow the title tags and metas along with offsite optimization to discern the page.
Topics: Testing |
March 5th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Ryan, That is great information I sometimes am afraid to change any of my internal links anchor text for the same concerns you had. Glad to see it didn’t have any impact.
March 5th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Yeah…I’m still a little uneasy about it, but, it really doesn’t appear to have made any changes. My site has changed rankings, but it always shuffles a little. There seems to be no change as a direcrt result and that makes me feel good because I prefer the look without spamming my own website with suped-up anchor text that looks bad to visitors…