As you probably already know Google has released Google Panda 3.3 on February 2012 along with 40 other search quality changes. I mentioned some of those changes on my recent rankings drop post and one of the most important changes and probably the one that is responsible for the massive de-indexing of blog networks and many people losing their rankings is the one about link evaluation.
Here is exactly what Google said about it:
Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
Google only said that they turned off a method of link analysis that they used for several years but they didn’t say exactly what it is. I read what was in my opinion the best explanation to what Google really turned off and I decided to share it with you here as I’m sure you might find it very useful. The article was originally written in Hebrew by Shimon Diament, a project manager at SEO Israel. I asked for his permission to translate parts of his article and share them with you and he gladly agreed.
Translation Begins
The truth is that when Google announces on their official blog that “We have changed the way in which we evaluate links” many SEOers are running in frenzy thinking the world has come to an end before they really take the time to sit and analyze what Google really said. So lets analyze what Google said and try to figure out what is really going on.
First, Google admits that they often use certain link characteristics to better understand the content of the linked page. What link characteristics can help Google understand what the content on the linked page is about? A Link or backlink has two important characteristics: the link method(href, JS, Flash) and the anchor text.
You might jump into conclusion and immediately think that Google is talking about the link method, meaning that Google indicates that from now on they are also taking into account JavaScript and Flash links rather than only standard Href links. If that was the case, they wouldn’t have mentioned the words – “the topic of the linked page” since the link method (JS, Flash, Href) has no effect on the content of the linked paged so we are left with the second possibility: the anchor text.
So now we know that Google used the anchor text in order to better understand the content of the page it was linking to. Please note that not only the Title, Description, Headings and Content of the page determined what the page is about but also the anchor text that was used to link to that page. If we would paraphrase from web pages to people, we can say that in order to understand who you are, it isn’t enough to hear what you say about yourself (Title, Description, Headings and Content) but also what others say about you (Anchor Text).
The truth is that Google reliance on anchor text has caused them some problems in the past. I’m sure you would recall the following Google bombing cases: Adobe Reader site being ranked number one for the term “click here” because that was the anchor text used on links in millions of pages directing to the download page of the Adobe Reader. And the much more funny case of the search term “Miserable failure” and President Bush.
Google’s latest update, and here we get to the second sentence of their bombastic statement, announces that from now on, a method used by Google for years to evaluate links will disappear:
We are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.
And the method is the weight given to anchor text to understand the subject of the page to which it links to. It seems that from now on, Google will not rely (completely or partially) on anchor text in order to evaluate what the linked page is about and for what key phrases it should rank for. So the question most would ask is what will Google rely on instead? The answer would be the title, description and the content itself. Google actually implied about such a change 4 months ago on their blog when they said the following:
Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
Google announced that it will show better titles by reducing the effect anchor text had on them (for those that didn’t know, Google did use the anchor text of links along with the title tag of the page in order to determine the title shown on the SERPs).
Before you jump into conclusions and say that Google simply decided to take search back 10 years when they evaluated pages based only on their title and description tags you should read carefully what they announced 4 months ago:
We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title […] The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
Meaning that the relevancy between the page content and its title tag will determine which title will be presented in the search results. If by Google calculations the title tag is accurate to the page content it will display it, and if not, it will determine a more appropriate title to the page content. Google isn’t interested in displaying “marketing” type of titles that draw attention and raise CTR if those titles are not accurately summarizing what the page is about.
How Does This All Relate to Rankings and SEO Work?
Very simple. Understanding the content of the page and choosing the title of that page will determine for what key phrases that page will rank in the search results. If we would summarize now the link evaluation update that caused the big stir in the SEO world, we could say that:
Google announced this month that it will stop the use of anchor text in understanding the content of the linked page. In addition, Google has recently announced that it stopped using anchor text when determining the title of pages. From now on, Google will rely on page content analysis in order to better determine what the page is about and what title should be displayed for it in the SERPs.
The conclusion for link building is that what you will use for anchor text will not change what Google thinks about the page and therefore will not determine or have any effect on that page rankings for the phrase used as anchor text. It doesn’t matter how many links we will build with “SEO” as anchor text, the ranking of the page that we are linking all those “SEO” links to will not change in Google.
Keep in mind that we are only talking about the anchor text of the link and not the link itself! Google have made no claim that outbound links have stopped promoting the linked pages. The only claim Google made is that it no longer matters what anchor text we will use for those links.
That’s it. Now you decide if this is indeed the most important search quality update by Google in recent years.
Translation Ends
I sure hope I was able to translate the article the best way possible and do it justice. As I mentioned earlier, it seemed to me when I read this article that it was the best explanation for what Google meant (not that anyone really knows) about the link evaluation update they announced recently and I do think it makes sense although I personally don’t really believe they turned anchor text off and that they would ignore it completely. I find it hard to believe they would simply turn such an important factor off but it does have its flaws and in general, I do think anchor text lost some of its power and will keep losing it in the coming future, with or without any announcement from Google.
What Do You Think?
Do you agree with Shimon? Do you think anchor text has been turned off by Google? Do you think that they turned off something else? Do you think it is the single most important search quality update of recent years? Where do you see link building and SEO going from here? Do you think all the hype and hoopla about this link evaluation update is justified? Please share your thoughts by commenting below. Every comment would be great appreciated 
.
Thanks.
To you success (and mine 
),
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
Very interesting article, thanks for sharing it!
I won’t try to guess what Google has changed with it’s algorithm but we can assume it is always in the interest of ranking websites based on relevance and content. Perhaps we will see a shift towards spending more time on content creation and less time building links to it.
Interesting times ahead.
Cheers,
Matt
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Wow Dror, that’s significant!
You are basically saying that Google dropped any evaluation of link anchor texts and what keyword is ranked is SOLELY based on the content of the linked-to page?
If this is the case that would be truly significant for link building, basically saying it doesn’t matter at all what anchors are being used. In a certain sense this makes actually sense since it allows for less “gaming” the system…
But it would ALSO imply a significant change eg. that it would be impossible to rank a “bad” and thin site simply by blasting many links with the according anchor. In other words: You cannot make a site talking about puppies and rank it for “weight loss” (ok, extreme example) ..respective the nr. of links with a specific anchor text would lose any importance whatsoever. (Which, by the way, is already the case in the “real world” since in the “real world” anchor keyword links are actually not used a lot. I think plain URL links, “here” etc. links make the majority of links). Interesting stuff here..
Georg.
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Hi Gerog, I’m actually not the one saying it, I just translated Shimon’s article and posted it here
I’m not 100% sure that Google is not taking anchor text into consideration anymore but there is no doubt they did make some major change and I think that only time will help us figure exactly what it was and what it really means.
Excellent interpretation. Thanks for giving me access to this information.
This update is supposedly an “on-off” scenario, but I think we should keep in mind that the ranking algorithm as a whole is about the relative weights of all its individual factors. Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. There are just a few basic factors that underlie the way Google ranks – value, honesty and integrity. If your site embodies these, and you know how to promote it in the same way, you’ll do fine.
It is pretty interesting indeed!
Honestly, I’m just a SEO newbie and just follow the news around the subject. My personal observation is that google works around following the natural trends of the typical user so it helps them. We marketers try to adjust our plan so it fits in the whole picture.
Yet, if they change the rules, a lot of marketers get hit and burst in emotions. Some of them say the paradox is that google kicks their own clients. This might be true indeed.
However, check out this deeper level.
If Google was easy to figure out in very meta-level and SEO masters could optimize their sites like no tomorrow, then it would be pretty much SEO high level full scale war that will get out of hand and the top search results will simply be junk. This will lead to user getting less and less value of the engine potentially leaving it, which will lead to less potential customers to their marketing sites, which will make all of us suffer.
Moral of the story – no one likes change, yet they may not realize it’s for the better of us all.
”
If Google was easy to figure out…
”
Believe it or not, Google is (in some odd way) easy to figure out. Google will always favor the natural, organic patterns on the web and will always TRY to detect and eliminate any artificial patterns. The more natural it is, the better it will be in Google’s eyes.
From that point of view, simply observe and look eg. at backlinks to a normal site, say wikipedia. How is the anchor text distribution, where are the links coming from?
How are people writing articles/posts…and then referencing to a site like wikipedia within their post? And then compare this pattern to a typical SEO link pattern where bad SEOs think they need to use keyword anchors in order to rank a site for a keyword. See the difference? It should be obvious, IMHO…
I have read this blog post again…and i am also about to agree that VERY LIKELY this has to do with anchor text although i am not believing they turned it entirely off. But this theory makes a lot sense knowing that anchor text is USUALLY something used by SEOs and not so much common in a “natural” scenario. Besides, there are not so many other attributes for links left, NoFollow etc…i don’t think so. So yes, i think this article is on to something and i believe this is what it is.
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I believe they are putting more weight on social aspects like links from Twitter or Facebook. (among other things)
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They only put more weight on social aspects if the site in quesion is social friendly. There is no need to like my page about hemroids or share with the world that I have herpes.
As far as the post is concerned, do you think I can fix some of my rankings drop by adding synonym/partial anchors and more general anchors? Will that negate what I presume to be an exact anchor density issue or has my site incurred a “time penalty?”
Does not seem like incurred a penalty but rather, an algo adjustment.
Trying to decide how to move forward and from the sounds of this post, I need to make sure I have a relevant but creative title, along with proper onsite seo and slowly backlink from good networks without too much emphasis on exact anchor.
In theory, one exact match anchor from related blog should tell google what site is about and the rest of the backlinks would add authority.
What do you think of my hypothesis?
I think you should put it to the test and see how that works. That is the only way to really figure it out
Be sure to let us know the results once you get some
Also, lets get crackin on LinkVana review. If you need any help on my end I would love to participate. I’m just not as good at evaluating the quality but I do have fresh sites ready if you want to team up. I think Shane offered a review but due to the nature of linkvana, I’m not sure I was satisfied with his findings. Sorry if this is not the place to mention this. I’ll email next time.
Hi Bo, what didn’t you like about Shane’s finding? Please email me through the contact form and we can talk more about getting the LinkVana Review ready.
Thanks.
Hi all,
I am on the way of Bo, means that for new page an exact anchor link have to be placed but all the other link cannot make any difference in ranking. I think link building help new page to be more related to content when Google cannot really know all the content put on the web minutes per minutes. I think content and author can make the difference because also for its social influence.
regards
damiano
In the mean time in Italy,
seo-people, that since now were exchanging jealously their back link, are putting on public forum a lots of guest post request to get content and putting new link in other blog. I think Google is trying to neutralize this effort..:-(
Regards
damiano
Interesting article.
What I got from this is Google is further improving and actually displaying relevant text to it’s users and the days of putting up spammy irrelevant content are over.
I think as long as you keep putting up the most useful and relevant content FIRST while building links AND getting some social signals you should be ok.
Those people who are freaking out are people who have been banking off Google by putting up crappy content and building crappy links that is of no use to the users.
If we all put the users FIRST and working WITH Google instead of trying to deceive them you will be rewarded.
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I believe now Google will not give you very fast credit for links you have built like it use to be earlier.
They may wait for weeks and then give credit as most spam links are deleted by that time.
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To be honest, I have no idea what they ignore in terms of link building analysis. I think they might adjust the weighting of the anchor text instead of ignoring them. However, based on the algorithm update from time to time, I feel that SEO will be a lot harder. All I’m doing is just stick to whatever is working and do it fast while it is still working. It is not uncommon a change of Google will affect the business of tons of people (i.e. Adwords…).
Paid traffic is something that I am testing currently to supplement SEO (if not replace). Ultimately, it is a traffic that can be scaled up easily and more reliable than SEO with Google.
To me
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Thank your for the interesting translated article. I have translated your article now in Dutch and tried it to explain
.
I’m still trying to figure out what the real impact is and will be. Need to see it in the near future as the current rankings of our clients websites have changed that much in ranking.
Hi Dror,
Sorry to hear about the drop in your rankings, it happened to me on one of my sites back when Google did their 1st Panda Update. If you don’t mind, I’ll share that website and mention what happened and how I got it back to the first page, but first I’d like to comment on the topic of this post here.
Of course all we content marketers can do is hypothesize and test. The problem with testing is that sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what is the primary factor causing the result of what we are testing is.
Backlinks have proven to be very useful in determining what to rank sites for (with some flaws). I think Shimon has made some great deductions here which we can’t discount. Maybe what they (Google) are doing is instead of using them to rank pages, they are being used to determine what Googlebot should compare the site’s content to (i.e. the linkjuice has been removed).
So an anchor text link could tell Google, “here’s 500 anchor text variations to the site, now use your intelligence algorithm to determine which of these variations is the best option to rank for.”
Google has also made it VERY clear that they are using social media channels and signals to help determine if a site should be ranked. I would think it’s a bit difficult to depend on social media to determine exactly “what” the site should rank for, so perhaps Google has moved the old “link juice” anchor text links had over to social media counts.
Really hard to know for sure, but to me that would seem like a logical way to determine how, where, and what ranking a site or page should be ranked.
About my site that got deindexed and then shot back up to the first page….
A little over a year ago I had an article on one of my business websites which was ranking on the first page of Google for my target keyword. Then one day and all of a sudden, the site disappeared from Google’s top 100; my analytics looked like a cliff dive.
I wasn’t sure what happened because I hadn’t been doing any further SEO “stuff” to it and even more… all the SEO to that site and page where natural. The article ranked so well because it got shared in many social channels and others blogged about it.
I finally figured out what happened…
I was too bold with my affiliate offers on the site. The site had about 15 or 20 pages on it with quality content, but every page had some kind of affiliate offer (Clickbank and Amazon offers) on them, all which varied.
The reason why I know this was the problem was that the only change I made to the website was to remove all but 2 or 3 affiliate offers and made those links “nofollow”. In about a month or so my site was reindexed and my article once again was on the first page of Google.
I’ve since removed all but 1 affiliate link and have added AdSense. My article is now ranked #4.
Also, since about two months ago I started linking to it using UAW and USA, social media, and also BMR. I haven’t noticed a drop, in fact just yesterday I moved up from position 5 to position 4. I guess I’ll have to keep testing, though, to get an idea of what is working the best.
I’m curious though, I haven’t seen you mention much about UAW and USA, just BMR. I have a gut feeling that using that spun content is going to bite us in the ass soon. I realize that the articles are highly spun, but when I do a search for one of my articles, I see lots of duplicate sentences. Can’t be good. What do you think?
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I dont think that G turned-off the anchor text at all. They said that they turned-off something that they were using for couple of years. The anchor text is way before couple of years.
Regards
They didn’t say a couple of years, they said several years… If you don’t think it has anything to do with anchor text, than what do you think it is?
I have no idea. Even several years it could not be the anchor text since we know the anchor text has been a factor from the very beginning.
Really I dont know “characteristics of links” may refer to a lot of things.
Hi Dror,
I have tested this anchor text thing in last two weeks and anchor text signal is still working in the same way it was working before this panda update. I am testing different things at the moment till now everything is reacting in the same way it used to be.
Regards.
Hi Jawad, thanks for the update. Can you explain more about how exactly you tested it?
Hi Dror, I have tested this for two keywords with two EMD and two normal blog posts. I built the links with anchor text as the targeted keyword and URL. When sites came up on the first page I removed the title of one EMD & one normal blog post. Google crawled my site again but I can still see the keyword is being shown as title in the google search and I only lost ranking for few spots.
Interesting stuff, thanks for the good writeup. Google always keeps us guessing, don’t they?
I’ve been testing a few things myself.
I’ve learned that exact match domain names definitely still help. Here’s two examples:
1. I registered one EMD which was (xxxx)reviews.com (the x’s are the other part of my keyword phrase). The competition was pretty low as the average PageRank on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase was around 1.0. Also, the competing pages were mostly reviews with 0-5 stars kind of sites where users leave reviews, comments, and ratings.
After registering the domain name all I did was put up a quick very basic text only html page. Things I did:
– EMD
– Optimized the title tag
– Optimized and only used one h1 tag
– Optimized the meta description tag
– Wrote two sentences. One stating which service this site was going to review and one with a note that this site is coming soon. Also, one of those sentences linked to the service I was going to review.
That’s it. No graphics, videos, sidebars, nothing. Just a simple white page with a title, two sentences, and a link to the service.
After a few days I was ranked #10. I’ve since built the site which includes about 3 content pages, about, contact us, disclaimer, and privacy page. I’ve done no backlinking other than 1 Stumble and 37 Facebook Shares.
I’m now ranked #7.
2. This was a .net EMD which was a product based review site (for a type of shoes). I’ve done no backlinking, no social bookmarking, or any other offsite SEO. The site is, however, very optimized with the onsite SEO and has about 4 pages of useful content (no images or videos).
After about 3 weeks or so I’m the middle of page 2. Competition for this site is around 2.0 average first page PageRank. I forget the exact number.
About backlinks and anchor text…..
I have a mini authority site which one page ranks really well for a competitive term and I wanted to rank another one for a very competitive term as well. The article is very well written and very useful with image diagrams and everything.
However, because of the competition for the keyword phrase, it was not ranked. About a month ago I started running a number of UAW campaigns using Leading Articles and a few days back I noticed I was ranked on the bottom of Page 3 of Google for my keyphrase.
Can’t say if it was the anchor text or the number of backlinks built that got it ranked, but one thing is for sure, UAW’s backlinks ranked it.
I did note, however, that this morning I am no longer ranked. This of course could be the Google Dance which happens sometimes or the fact that after I was ranked I tried another automated service which I tested and to be honest, I probably shouldn’t have.
Regardless of that, this certainly proves to me that backlinking is still very strong. As always, a good variation of keyword anchor text is needed. I think Google is smart enough to sort out which terms are the most important to rank for based on your content.
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