An Insight into Anchor Links!

Microsoft has published an application patent which offers more insight into how search engines use anchor text to rank a website.

A recently published patent application of Microsoft gives further insight on how search engines use the anchor text in links to rank web pages. Not all links are created equally even if they use the same anchor text.

What is the anchor text?

The anchor text is the text that is used in the link on your site which goes to another web page. It is an highly prestigious factor in the ranking maths (technically known as algorithms) of Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines.

The greater the number of pages which link to another web page, the more probability there is of the website ranking higher in the search listings.

How do search engines use the anchor text in ranking algorithms?

A lot of people believe that links with the same anchor text are equally important. The new patent indicates that this is not, in fact, true.

Bing wants to understand the relationships between websites that link to the same page with the same anchor text, and the relationship between pages that link to another page.|

If a number of pages link to the same page with the same anchor text, Bing examines these pages to check if they link to many pages which are the same in content.If there is a measurable increase in the overlap between the two, then Bing is likely to discount the link as spammy.

Bing monitors the level of dependence between the linked page and the linking page. If the linking site links to many pages of the linked site, the pages are probably dependent and the influence of the links will be reduced.

Bing tries to detect several different dependency situations:
Copied pages or mirror sites.
Source sites that have a duplicate destination site and where the source sites are owned and designed by the same users - who execute SEO Services - In our business known as "black hat" linking.
Links which are artificially added to a site by a source such as a hacker or spammer, or by an automated program. Often these highly misleading links are hard to find as they are added to the web page via invisible blocks.
The relevance of an anchor text seems to depend on many different factors, including the relation of the linking pages to the linked page.

Even though this is a patent which is filed by Microsoft (under the Bing umbrella), It appears likely to this author that the same methods and practices are employed by Google, Yahoo! and other engines.

Chris Wheeler
Metalfrog Studios Limited