Google Shows 'Datalicious' Anchor Phrases
David A. Utter | Staff Writer
More useful information for site publishers arrives from Google's
Webmaster Central as they begin reporting on anchor text phrases
linking to a website; Danny Sullivan coins a word to describe the
update.
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.
David A. Utter | Staff Writer
More useful information for site publishers arrives from Google's
Webmaster Central as they begin reporting on anchor text phrases
linking to a website; Danny Sullivan coins a word to describe the
update.
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.