How important is Anchor Text for backlinking?

hyperlinking a smiley face, compared to just a normal link?

same effect, just a backlink.

problem with forums, you cant use ALT text, which will help to insert a keyword into an image.


but its not just about backlinks, its the content, how is google rating your page? basic reader level? intermediate reading level? advanced reading level?

you'll find for the most part basic reading levels are ranked higher.

No, though it can get you backlinks, but the thing is, it is not a good practice as it comes under gray or even black hat seo, and the Big G really don't like this sorts of SEO.

Regards

Using keywords is imperative for SERP ranking.

I agree with this. It is not a good method of getting backlinks because it is intentionally underhanded. If you want forum backlinks, I suggest you simply find forums which allow signatures.

When you do things that Google considers to be Tricks or something normal people wouldn't do you put yourself at risk of being caught in a filter.

Seriously who links from punctuation and isn't considered a spammer?

According to me if you hyperlink smiley then it would consider as black hat seo practice. Its better to get links from forums which allows signatures.

using the keyword is really important to rank but, if you use a non relevant anchor text like a smiley you can still get some PR passed on to your domain which imo helps with internal linking power.

My friend did get his websites banned that were using invisible forum links to rank... Almost as bad as using a smiley I think (I'm not google so I cannot know for sure) so I would be careful with those methods.

Anchor text is very important.Google want to know the links that what it is about.

Anchor Text is more important when doing Back Linking.Anchor Text is the text that user will see.So it must be the keyword that we want to promote and it should be that which is used by the people for searching the information from the internet.

No google doesn't consider it as a backlink...

Anchor text is extremely important for ranking your keywords. Your onpage optimization also has some influence but anchor text backlinks are the backbone of ranking

Be careful you don't use the same anchor text for all your backlinks, be sure to mix them up!

Remember... you are playing Google's Game, not the other way round.
Anchor texts are very good, definitely preferable over any smiley. :/

The keyword defined in the anchor text has been indexed by Google and help a website.

an anchor text backlink from a lower PR/no pr page may be better, I think. anchor text play more important value than no anchor text link from high PR thead, because the backlinks value can be dispersed to the links on the pages.

Lol, I forgot I made this thread. Couple thoughts:

Its a link...pointing back to a site...of course its a backlink. HOW is this even debatable?

My thoughts are that there is a little bit of value to be had from this practice, but its not really sustainable and will probably offend forum owners and potentially google - esp. if done on a large scale. And with all the available forums out there, it makes more sense to find ones that allow sigs, esp. since anchor text links are more valuable for SERPs, and its a sustainable practice.

Let me just share How Anchor text is important when Judging Competition for a Keyword. If you think about how significant anchor texts are to the search engines when determining ranking for a keyword, then it’s easy to see why it is a critical component of analyzing the competition for a particular keyword phrase.

Google even provided a certain search operator to do this – the allinanchor operator. You can use it by keying in the following in the Google search bar: Allinanchor: "your keyword phrase”

This will return the said pages which contain the anchor text pointing to it that contain the quoted keyword phrase. I hope you can see how powerful this is – first of all, Google must think it is an important element of a page because it provides the allinanchor operator. Just the presence of the operator would seem to point out that it uses the anchor text when deciding what a page is about and ranking it.

Secondly, by using this operator, you will be shown which pages are optimizing for your chosen keyword phrase!

It makes sense that only the pages that have anchor text backlinks with your phrase are the ones optimizing for it so you can forget about searching for your phrase in quotes or any of that nonsense.

Not only that but, you can take a look at the actual backlinks for each of your opponents and then see how many of them have that anchor text and what the strength of those links are to make a more educated guess as to how difficult they will be to beat out for that top spot.

If you can find a high pr page where you can post it may worth the time to create a "smiley" link. A "smiley" link can pass juice for your site.

Of course it is not an anchor text link but it will help your site to get more trust.

What will you say when you get caught placing an illicit smiley link?

can a blank space be used as a link? let me try:

<a href="http://www.google.com"> </a>

holy crazps you can link a space, just not on this board. it'll be a space but then if you hover over it, you can click on it.