SEO experiments

March 14th, 2007

It’s not often these days that an SEO company/consultant releases their private experiments with SEO for public consumption, so it’s great to see theGooglecache blog in reply to a post on seoMoz with answers to some of the unsolved questions in SEO.

Here’s the link to the original post, and my (hopefully simplified) explanations of the points.

1. The Diminishing Value of Anchor Text

If page A has 2 links to page B, and each of those links uses different link text, then the first link text will be considered by Google as more authoritative.

2. How Far Does Synonymy Go?

Take a search for ‘Bryan Gumbel’ - Google assumes you mean ‘Bryant Gumbel’ (American sports presenter) and gives higher weight to those pages that rank for the correct spelling than you might expect. What is worthy to note though, is that this only applies when the misspelling is a shortened version of the correct one - a search for ‘Brian Gumbel’ weights the misspellings much more. This is probably Google’s way of easily dealing with plurals and contractions.

3. Can Link Removals Hurt Rankings?

If you have a page without many links, and you gain and then subsequently lose an important link, you’ll be worse off than if you never had the link at all. This negates any benefit from sneaking your link onto a high ranking page if the owner then removes it (eg Wikipedia pre no-follow), and should also act as a warning against buying links (if you’re buying them for short periods of time)

4. Does Sharing Registrants with Spammers Hurt You?

Basically, the advice here is that you shouldn’t use the same personal information to register a blackhat domain that you use for whitehat domains.

5. Text Placement Weighting

Text that’s at the top of the source code is given more prominence than that at the bottom. Google has got good at judging what elements of your site are navigation and what is content, but there’s still more than enough evidence about that you should minimise navigational code at the top of your page, and put the most important content at the top. The example given for this is to put the ‘tags’ for an article at the top.

6. Higher links = more weight

If you have 6 links on a page, the one at the top is given more weight than those at the bottom. The perfect example of this is the ‘five seo excuses’ SERPs (Not current any more) which show that a company was able to list subdomains in order to spell out a marketing phrase by having a list of links in preferred order.