Are keywords surrounding anchor text in a backlink important?

I say No.

I also had this in mind when i started creating profile links for my site. i thought specially for yahoo seo surrounding keywords does matter.

But even after 6 months my site is not getting much traffic from yahoo though it is ranking at page 1 in google.

it depends on the kind of webpage you're getting a link from

on a normal webpage it would make a difference yes because if your keywords are around your link then the page you're getting a link from is more relevant

I have a site in the free online games niche (pr5) and i''ve found the high pr links i have are worth way more when they're from other game sites

however if you're getting low quality links like profile links then it probably won't make any difference because Google is clever enough to realize that it's a profile link rather than a link from a related page

You need to look at this from their perspective.

How many link lists do you see ranking high?

Google crawls a page and evaluates the entire page. Thus "Page Rank" and not "Site Rank".

Now if a page has unrelated links pointing all over the place what does this tell Google about your link?

So if you place "relevant" keywords around your link... but the other links are still unrelated what does this tell Google about the page?

That's your answer.

Focus on linking from places that drive real relevant targeted traffic to your site and people will reward you by visiting and SEO results will follow.

There are millions of people out there just placing links... and it's not relevant and won't make them money.

You need targeted traffic that is relevant. Develop a marketing plan that targets people not machines.

Huh?


Ok - logic.

Do we know if google crawls the content of the whole page or just your anchor text/links? The whole page right?

So ... if they crawl your links anchor text - and thats important that the anchor text be or contain your keywords for effectiveness... AND we know google is crawling and analyzing the whole page, AND we know that google gives credit for on page seo for keyword density [ # of times kw's on your page ] and if those keywords are in titles/header tags ....

It sure stands to reason and seems logical to me - that the offsite page where you backlink and its anchor text reside will be weighted based upon the other related words/content on that page being related to your links.

I am referring to the content on or near your anchor text backlinks - not the name or url or theme of the site your on. So ... if you post a blog post on a Basket weaving site, with content about your keywords which might be weight loss - you want some more content on hte basket weaving site about weight loss near your keyword link.

So the theory goes.

If you "can" make a full content post [ like a blog or forum post ] on a site and add additional relevant content about your keywords on a site that is NOT relevant to your keywords - i view that as an advantage.

anchor text link on non relevant site - pretty good.

anchor text link surrounded by "relevant" content on a NON Relevant site - better.

anchor text link [weight loss ] surrounded by "weight loss" content on a weight loss authority site - likely the best.

Any of the 3 above you can get fast cheap and easy that will stick and not get deleted - better still.

My gut would say yes but that would be the wrong answer. SEO is about testing. Not what we think is logical or practical or whatever. One point I'd like to make to you since you said in another thread you were new is don't buy every theory that people push UNLESS they can back it up.

Doing a test on that would be extremely difficult to isolate out the other factors. There are a few people who try to push this idea of links only from related sites and surrounding context but as far as I know no one has shown any test results.

So do i think its logical? Yes but I also think its logical that if I write on a poetry blog that i really like this site (Fill in a site name) because its so cool Google may very well decide that its not fair to think that my poetry site can't recommend a cool non poetry site and treat a vote as a vote. Thats entirely possible too.

Actually I think it s probably far more likely that the entire sites LSI content has apart to play than putting a few words around a link but thats not tested either. Just anecdotal that I tend to see Some sites rank high for some terms when those words just seem to be in their niche (internet marketing terms here on warriors tend to show up higher than similar terms on a parenting forum for example).

But again if you want to do well don't concentrate on what hasn't been proven.

what is the best way to build backlink?

reprocial link, or one way link?..............

If I understood the theories discussed here correctly then it might not just be anchor text or text surrounding the anchor text, but all the on page factors of the pages linking to a site. Something like: If the majority of the pages listing the keywords of the query agree that this page is an important source then it must be number one.

Yes, the google filed patent also clearly states this, the worth of backlink is counted with the help of freshness of content around the backlink as well as how well the anchor text of the backlink is related to the content around it.