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.

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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About the Author

Jim Westergren is a Swedish web entrepreneur currently living in Spain. He is happily married and has three lovely children. Some of his interests are web development, SEO and writing.
He is the Founder of DomainStats and N.nu. Read his full about page.