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Allinanchor - To Quote or Not To Quote?

by kyleb
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So doing a bit of searching around on Google and I cannot seem to find a definitive answer on this but I think I have a pretty good understanding of what the answer may be. Just hoping to confirm or either disprove this and offer up a better explanation.

I'd love to here what a fellow warrior has to say on this and if they can give any further insight into it.

When you do a search for a word in quotes then you typically get much more targeted results and fewer results than if you do a broad search for a word.

That is all basic stuff there so I am not going to go into any of it in detail. If you are answering this question then you already understand the basics, obviously.

So when you do a search using the allinanchor parameter on Google for a keyword with and without quotes the results can be vastly different and I am pretty sure when you do a search in quotes it gives you a better understanding of actually how many sites there are with the anchor text pointing to it in that exact order.

But the numbers are sometimes higher with the word in quotes than it is than without quotes.

For instance look at these two results for the word "making money online"

Allinanchor With Quotes

Allinanchor Without Quotes

So it would seem there are more links for that exact keyword in that order than just those words in any order. Am I understanding this correctly?

I'd love to hear some greater insight into this.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Kyle
#allinanchor #exact search
  • Profile picture of the author zerofill
    Yep...

    With quotes is basically that phrase match and without quotes is in any order...

    I actually use inanchor with quotes only when doing research...

    I search the phrase both with inanchor:"phrase" and normally...

    The results that appear on both searches pretty much tell you your competition... (who is really building the most links with and optimized the best for that phrase)

    Then I take a quick skim of the page for bold letters with my exact phrase...

    I can determine in less than 5 minutes if I am going to go after that keyword.

    People spend wayyyyy too much time on keyword research...
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  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi kyleb,

    I assume you are referring to the "about X,XXX,XXX results" section of the SERP. That number is not an accurate number it is just a guess, hence the use of the word "about". Google uses a formula that calculates the probable pages based on a small sample dataset. Since the term "make money online" is a statistical aberration it creates what is known as a data outlier.

    The bottom line is that you should never put much trust in the "about _ results" number, it's just a guess, not actual data.
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    • Profile picture of the author wsotoolz
      Originally Posted by dburk View Post

      I assume you are referring to the "about X,XXX,XXX results" section of the SERP. That number is not an accurate number it is just a guess, hence the use of the word "about". Google uses a formula that calculates the probable pages based on a small sample dataset. Since the term "make money online" is a statistical aberration it creates what is known as a data outlier.

      The bottom line is that you should never put much trust in the "about _ results" number, it's just a guess, not actual data.
      This is one reason why I always take it a step further and pull the number for something I call RC "Real Competition". Do the same allinanchor search but instead of taking that estimated number you can go to the last page of results and get the true number of results returned. It looks like this:

      Page 61 of about 66,400 results (0.20 seconds)

      In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 602 already displayed.

      The number to grab is the 602. Google never returns more then 1000 results. So instead of the allinanchor result of 66,400 now you know Google only really thinks 602 sites are relevant.

      For a keyword like "make money online" with allinanchor and RC you would get the full 1,000 results and would know this would be a bad idea for a keyword to try and tackle.
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      • Profile picture of the author dburk
        Originally Posted by wordpress_seo View Post

        This is one reason why I always take it a step further and pull the number for something I call RC "Real Competition". Do the same allinanchor search but instead of taking that estimated number you can go to the last page of results and get the true number of results returned. It looks like this:

        Page 61 of about 66,400 results (0.20 seconds)

        In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 602 already displayed.

        The number to grab is the 602. Google never returns more then 1000 results. So instead of the allinanchor result of 66,400 now you know Google only really thinks 602 sites are relevant.

        For a keyword like "make money online" with allinanchor and RC you would get the full 1,000 results and would know this would be a bad idea for a keyword to try and tackle.
        Hi wordpress_seo,

        While I agree with you that using actual data is more reliable than the relatively inaccurate estimate, it still leaves a lot of room for inaccuracy. Your method only provides meaningful data if there are fewer than 1000 possible results. Any query with greater than 1000 possible results will have the same number, 1000 (minus omitted results).

        The 602 number you reference in your post does not represent the number of "sites" that are relevant. Google does not index websites, they index individual pages. That 602 number is the number of pages that are returned, not the number pages indexed, and not the number of websites. It's possible that in some cases more than half of those pages could be from a single website and the bulk of those pages could all be from just a few websites.

        Also, your method may exclude allintitle: results which is also an strong indicator of the number of competitors.

        Finally, the most important thing to consider is that these methods are only indicators of the number of competing pages, not the strength of competition. You could have a large number of competing pages but relatively weak competitors for the top ten positions in SERP. Conversely, you might have a relatively small number of competing pages, but with massive competitve strength that will make it very difficult to rank on the first page of search results.
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  • Profile picture of the author zerofill
    Nah using that technique you don't care about the number of results that isn't what you are looking at actually.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kurt
    Originally Posted by kyleb View Post

    For instance look at these two results for the word "making money online"

    Allinanchor With Quotes

    Allinanchor Without Quotes

    So it would seem there are more links for that exact keyword in that order than just those words in any order. Am I understanding this correctly?

    I'd love to hear some greater insight into this.

    I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

    Kyle
    From a purely logical point of view, exact order (with quotes) can NOT be higher than any order(no quotes). The best it could be is "exact order" equals "any order".

    This is because an exact match is also an "any order" match.

    Finding examples where "exact" returns higher results that "any" show the numbers are basically meaningless. The only other reason is that "exact order" are removed from all matches, leaving only "any order", which I can't think of a benefit for...
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