Evidence of related text with links giving rank boost
EDIT: April 30, 2006:
What I was seeing below was Co Citation in full action, it was not “related text with links” as I thought. Thanks to Gustaf for the heads up (below) and thanks to Jim Boykin for explaining Co Citation.
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One of the keyword terms that I track is “Jim Westergren”. I know what is in the SERPs about that phrase and thus it is easy to track and analyse.
Yahoo query, 35,200 hits.
On the first result is this blog, of course, but on the second is SEO-Fusion.com which is very interesting.
If you check you will see that on the page of SEO-Fusion.com the phrase is not on the page. There are also NO backlinks to SEO-Fusion with the anchor text of “Jim Westergren”. BUT the links going to SEO-Fusion.com usually has the KW phrase around it OR there is a link to this blog with the KW phrase as anchor on the same page. Interesting, isn’t it.
Now check Google, here. 328,000 hits. First result this blog and on second rank is JW-Webbdesign.se. There is only 1 small mention of the KW phrase on that page on that site at the bottom, compare that to some others you can see in the SERPs. Reason? The same as above. The links to JW-Webbdesign.se is mentined besides the links to my blog with my name on a lot of places.
The conclusion to this is that we can clearly see that both Yahoo and Google uses the text surrounding links in their algo and what does that mean? Get links that are related to your site.
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Good to hear that
hope something will come out of this for my sites;)
on another note,
Congrats Jim for the Washington Post stuff
Hello Jim,
I think this is more about co-citation than related text. Because if all the sites that link both to your blog and seo-fusion did not have a link to your blog but barely the KW phrase, that would not boost the rank. So this does not prove “related links”-theory as I see it, just that both Google and Yahoo use cocitation to rank sites, which has been known for long.
Hi Gustaf,
Thanks! I read up on this and you are very right on this.
I will update my post.
Your research is very useful…
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the heads up. Just clicked on “similar pages” and sure enough, http://www.jw-webbdesign.se comes up right under your domain.