SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Earlier I reported on how pranksters push unwarranted sites like George Bush’s biography to the top of the search engine results list by employing Google Bombing tactics.

Despite complaints, Google decided not to manually manipulate rankings of the site. Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer products, says: “Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service.”

Google bombing as defined by Answers.com: “A Google bomb or Google wash is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine. Due to the way that Google’s PageRank algorithm works, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text. Googlebomb is used both as a verb and a noun.”

In the largest ever case discovered of its kind, when a search is done on Google for the word “failure”, the result — George Bush’s Whitehouse Biography.

So it wasn’t just “miserable failure” that resulted in the number one rank for the current President much earlier. With 78.3 million results in Google for that word, it was no small feat to get this specific page ranked for that word.

All bloggers did was to place the URL for that site into the anchor text in their copy. The search engine spiders pick it up and used it to rank a page.

Following my discussion on anchor text you can begin to see that your site’s anchor text is one of the most important weighted factors to get ranked for your keywords.

Choose your anchor text wisely and well using research not guesswork.

A commonly overlooked aspect of search engine rankings is the descriptive text. When another site links to you from an article, it will generally have surrounding text relevant and meaningful to your site describing its contents.

While its weight isn’t as great as the link text or anchor text, it still plays a role in defining what your site or website sub-page is about.

Consider this…

What information can you derive from these two types of links?

Air Conditioning and Heating Contractor

Call the city’s oldest and most respected

air conditioning and heating contractor

when you desire to get reliable and fast service that’s available when you need it the most.

I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the latter is more meaningful to you as a reader. Search engines are supposed to deliver the results you seek. The better quality, the more targeted, and the more relevant the results, the more likely the searcher will use that search engine again.

As search engines get more sophisticated, surrounding text could become almost as important as the link itself.