Anchor Text Weight vs. Title Tag Weight

[loungeact]

I spend hours in this forum each week, but I have never registered or felt the urge to post anything, simply because I haven't felt that I have had anything of new value to add -- until today.

I have played with and researched anchor text, but I didn't realize how much importance it could have all by itself with G, until I stumbled onto an unintentional effect. This is very weird, at least to me. I am sure others has realized the importance, but I just didn't see it illustrated this way until today. I am sure there are many examples that are better than this, but this is the best I have seen.

When you search the term view all items on G, my company's site is #2 out of 15,300,000 results. When you do an exact search for that term - "view all items", the results drop to 1,080,000, however our rank only drops one spot to #3. Being placed #3 out of 1million results, based mostly on anchor text, is surprising.

Yes, there are hundreds of pages with that link/anchor text on our site, however the actual link itself is a redirect, and the redirected page doesn't reflect that exact term "view all items" in the text, or title tag, etc.. The only factor really going into that ranking is the anchor text; this is what is so weird. I didn't think that kind of ranking was possible with so few links, relatively speaking.

Thoughts, opinions anyone?

The same thing has happened with a few of the other navigation links on the same page (novelty keychains, novelty flags, kids pranks...), but those terms aren't that competitive, relatively speaking, and don't have nearly as many results to pull from. On the other hand, the same anchor text isn't enough to push some of our really competitive terms to the top, but it obviously does much more than I thought.

The meta tags for all of our dynamic pages are procreated sitewide, so that isn't something that can be changed individually. The anchor text seem to be right under the title tag, in terms of importance. This changes my entire perspective about the navigation and how that effects se ranking, but I am nervous about tweaking anything and risking the rankings we have now.

My intention has always been to make our site as easy as possible for customers to navigate and spend money first and foremost, with the search engines thought of secondly. If I can improve rankings w/o impacting the usability, it seems to be a no-brainer though. What to do?

Brian

[Mel]

You are right Brian, choosing and using anchor text in site links can be a powerful ranking tool, if they are used in a way that the spiders can read them.

Many large sites that use javascript powered menus that cannot be read by spiders lose this advantage, when with a bit of thought and effort could produce a navigation system that looks and functions the same way, but which can be spidered to gain anchor text links.

Regarding the relative power of the page title versus links, remember that you ony have one page title per page but you can have thousands of anchor text links pointing at a page.

There are many examples of pages which rank very well for terms which are not contained on the page anywhere, but get thier rankings soley due to anchor text.

[Terry Van Horne]

Originally Posted by Mel

There are many examples of pages which rank very well for terms which are not contained on the page anywhere, but get thier rankings soley due to anchor text.

Yes, but how much control do you have over that? IMO, very little. But, I have complete control over my titles and IMO, competitive keywords are tough to get with just link text these days... in the past.. it was possible... now I'd say that is less of a factor.