Playing Reindeer Games With The Search Engines

Have you ever noticed a nonsensical word in a link and wondered what was up with that? Well, I will tell you what is up with that.

There is a strong chance that you landed on this page as the result of clicking on a link that had some nonsensical term in the link pointing to this page.

Most SEO practitioners learn what they know about search engine optimization by testing new concepts, trying them out, and measuring the results.

I have always said that when Google sees several links to the same URL from the same page, then Google will only attribute the anchor text from the first link to the destination web page. But, I recently learned that I could be wrong on this count, so I needed to set up a test to validate how Google would actually handle this occurrence.

It was just a few weeks ago when I saw a conversation in which Matt Cutts of Google fame participated.

A participant in the thread asked about this very topic, and Cutts did respond, but in a way that I found interesting. The fact is that Cutts answered with a non-answer - or more to the point - a challenge. Cutts did not say that this point of view is right, nor did he say that it was wrong. Instead, Cutts challenged the person to test it for him or herself to learn the answer.

So today is my first chance to put together a scientific test structure to figure it out - for sure- once and for all.

The only links to this web page are from this website and any website that might be running the RSS feed from this website.

Since it is possible that other sites might have links to this page, I will not detail the nonsensical anchor text keywords that I am using to link to this page. However, those links only appear on one page… on the post that precedes this one.

Although that page is a new post from yesterday, it is a post that has several links pointing to it. I wrote that post and turned it into a distribution article. And from the article itself, a note is made that the article was originally posted on the previous page, with a link to the previous post on this blog.

As a result, the page that links to this page with the target nonsensical anchor text keywords will have some link popularity to support the procurement of good test results.

All of the relevant nonsensical anchor text keywords have been checked with Google prior to the rollout of this test. There are a few results in Google now for the targeted nonsensical keywords, due to spelling errors and the such, but the number of results in every case is less than eight results, so all were deemed to be worthy for this test.

If only the first nonsensical anchor text ends up in Google’s search results in relation to this web page, then the outcome will be as suspected. If all three nonsensical anchor text keywords end up in Google’s search results in relation to this web page, then you and I will have learned something new, and I will have learned that I have been wrong on this point for a number of years.

So, let the reindeer games begin…

Bill Platt - owner of Kama SEO

Tags: anchor text, google, google search results, keywords, linking, links, matt cutts, nonsensical anchor text, reindeer games, seo, seo test