A little while ago I read the following thread over at SEOmoz:
Results of Google Experimentation - Only the First Anchor Text Counts
This made me panic a bit, because it would have meant that the footer link I had on this blog was not helping my homepage rank. I think someone mentioned in the discussion that even if the 1st link was nofollowed, it would still be the only one that counted. This would have meant that I was supposed to be completely shafting myself.
I got rid of the 1st links to the homepage altogether hoping to see a rise in Google for my main phrase, but I did not. I did however rise over 60 places, within less then a week or so on MSN/Live search.
I wanted to know for sure with Google, so when I 1st changed over my design less then a week ago, I made it so that every post in this blog linked to the about us page, with my name as the anchor text. I have just checked today and it is ranking 4th on Google UK, just behind my Yahoo! post.
- The 1st anchor text always says about
- There is very little on-page for it, other then the links in these posts
- There are other pages with far more David Eaves links (external ones)
- There are no external links to that page using that anchor text
My conclusion: Google does not only look at the 1st link to a page for anchor text, MSN/Live search does and I am not too sure about Yahoo!
Good advice and practice from SEOmoz anyway though, if only for MSN. Why take a chance on it? Make sure that you have your good anchor text in the 1st links to your pages.
Update: Seeing how VanDeMar seems to be the one who started this whole thing off, here is a link to his original post:
You May Be Screwing Yourself With Hyperlinked Headers
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 2nd, 2008
I have been working hard over the last week or so, on the new design for this site. I have still got a long way to go, but I certainly feel like things are starting to fall into place.
I have changed a lot of the URLs on the main site and as you would expect everything is going fine with Google. Yahoo! seems to be very slowly getting there and I have no doubt sent a kiss goodbye to many of my MSN/Live search rankings for quite sometime.
The new logo is what I like best about this new design, if you look carefully at the blue design, that is actually a little SEO, with an arrow pointing upwards at the top. When the designer James was showing it to me, he was like;
“the abstract design contains the letters S,E and O and the arrow pointing upwards represents your clients rankings going to the top.”
I just loved it instantly and I was like:
“you had me at S”
I am not too sure about this font and one or two people have commented that it is a little small, I will probably be changing it in the next couple of weeks. I am going to get this hacked up, broken thing looking like a blog as well.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 1st, 2008
I am pleased to report that this morning when I attempted to go to http://www.yahoo.com I was redirected to the UK version http://uk.yahoo.com.
It was just the other week when I was complaining about this not working properly and I think Brian mentioned it in his Yahoo! rant somewhere.
I have got a couple of clients who rank fairly well on the UK Yahoo! for some pretty decent phrases who up until now have only been getting a couple of hundred uniques a week from it. It will be interesting to see if this improves things. I know for a fact that Yahoo.com can send some good traffic, it is just the UK version that up until now has never really sent any.
I do not know if this is working in other countries or not yet, it could just be UK IP addresses that are getting redirected.
Update: Flyerguy over at Webmaster World has confirmed that German IP addresses that visit Yahoo.com are now being redirected to http://de.yahoo.com. It looks like the changes could have been made worldwide.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
May 15th, 2008
Just been looking at my statistics tonight and I am pleased to report that according to Google Analytics Sphinn has sent 286 unique visitors to my last article Linking To The BBC Will Boost Your Google Ranking.
When I wrote the traffic estimate article on the 19th of February I said that on average it would send between 50-200 unique visitors to a popular story, but to be honest with you I had never seen anything above 120 or so, someone else persuaded me to raise it to 200.
Is this a normal amount of frontpage traffic for Sphinn now? Or was I just lucky? Should I update the traffic estimate article? Or not?
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
May 10th, 2008
O.K. I am going to pick on The Times because it is funny. On Sunday they published an article entitled Searching to get to the top of Google.
Most of the article is O.K. and it is nice to see SEO getting mentioned in a major newspaper, however some of their facts are a little off.
On the 3rd page of the article it says the following:
“As well as using appropriate vocabulary, a website also needs to be well-networked to gain traction. Links to esteemed websites such as the BBC or a national newspaper act as advocates for its content, boosting its ranking with Google.”
There is a common miss-conception that linking to authoritative websites can boost a website’s rankings in the search engines and I have spoken to many people who have thought this before. This is of course not true, linking to a website can improve it’s rankings, linking out from one cannot.
This has got to be great linkbait for the BBC and the all of the National newspapers, I can just see all the Sunday Times readers going out and linking them now. Who knows, maybe they made the mistake on purpose.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
May 6th, 2008
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