Hi guys, After some discussions in a previous thread about anchor text (and image's alt text), I decided to run a test to verify some claims. What I am trying to ascertain is a) is PR from incoming page taken into account for ranking of the anchor text? b) is alt text recognised if it is not part of a hyperlink? To do this, I have created two pages: 1. Test page 1 linked to from this PR7 page 2. Test page 2 linked to from this PR4 page The anchor text used is 'widgeteroo' - something with NO results yet in google. The alt text of the image on the page is 'widgiterie'. It appears nowhere else and is not part of a link. I personally expect Test Page 1 to rank 1st for both widgeterie and widgeteroo and I would consider it reasonable proof that the PR of the incoming link is of importance and that the alt text of images is taken into account for rankings. I'd be interested to know if anyone sees any flaw in my simple test. Now to wait and see them ranked
just a message so I can find this topic back easily I am definately coming back to hear about results. Hmz. are the image alt texts so damn important? didnt know that.. I knew it had value but I thought that anchor texts were way more important!
I'm not suggesting it is that important - I just want to verify whether or not it is even taken into account. There was some suggestion that the alt text wouldn't be considered unless it was part of a hyperlink. I'm curious to know whether that's true. Anchor text is certainly considered much more valuable. btw. state of affairs: one result showing for 'widgeteroo', but it's the PR7 page containing the link.
What you are showing is speed or frequency of googlebot visiting If your PR 7 has more frequent visits then it will show up sooner
Yeah, I understand that. The PR7 page is updated very frequently, so no great surprise there. I'll wait until both of the pages that are linked to are indexed to draw any conclusions.
Well the lower PR page will most probably rank lower than the PR7 for 2 reasons 1. It has a title that is numerically lower than the other and if Google, when all else fails, uses a directory logic that is what will happen 2. Even though PR is degraded does not mean that it does not have an effect so I would expect them to rank in the PR ranking order However at this morning widgeteroo has disappeared
Hmm... interesting. you think the numbering has an effect. Never heard of that, but I guess it's possible.. We could always try swapping titles afterwards to see if that makes a difference. Does this bit of information mean we should all have a 0 at the front of our titles, just for those REALLY close situations? Anyway, so far the "Keyphrase 1" page is indexed, but not ranking for either widgeteroo or widgeterie. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that a) Google hasn't factored in backlinks yet and b) Unless it changes, it does look like the ALT text isn't being taken into account at all!
Several months later now.. I checked the rankings and found out some interesting things! The keyphrase1 page has a PR of 4 and the keyphrase 2 page has a PR of 2. A search for 'widgeterie' provides no results whatsover. To me this confirms that alt text of images is not taken into account for on-page content. A search for 'widgeteroo' shows both pages listed. When doing a sitewide search for 'widgeteroo' surprisingly the keyphrase2 page ranks highest !! This is despite a higher PR of the page AND a higher PR from the incoming link. All things being equal, it seems the ordering is entirely random - unless the 'directory logic' claimed by Foxy is in fact back to front! Unsuprisingly though, the two pages linking to the keyphrase pages rank 1st and 2nd in their PR order. Clearly on-page content is considered more important in this scenario where two PR4 pages have to be compared (one with an incoming link and one with on-page text). A final interesting point to note is that the description used for the widgeteroo search is the text 'widgerie', which is used as alt text of the image. So image's alt text is used for something - but about the same as a site description. As for other engines; Yahoo and Ask jeeves don't seem to have indexed either page. MSN has indexed both pages, but doesn't return them from any search (suggests that anchor text is meaningless there, unless there is similar text on the page.. maybe). There's my findings.. I may alter the page to test some other things (like what would happen if the links to the pages were images with an appropriate alt text) And a final observation is that both pages rank for 'travellerspoint keyphrase html' 'html' only appears in the page's url and 'travellerspoint' only in the url and on the referring page. It suggests that either the url is used in ranking a page OR the url in the <a href="xx"> is used in ranking the page. Any thoughts are welcome.
daamsie: It seems to me that you would be very interested in the Search Engine Reverse Engineering Project.
I try and use the title tag for plain text links...put in the targeted keywords. When link exchanging I request a link with the title parameter and my keywords too. Another tip I heard of was to use mispellings of popular search terms. That way if someone searches for "widgets" but accidently types in "wedgets" you'll come up number one because there are no other direct matches. ...would make an interesting experiment. Jon
I think you should test around 10 pages on different domains. Because single page test can not give accurate result. We have to take average.
You're probably right there aspcoder. For instance, I'm not really sure this proves the 'pr doesn't matter' for incoming links, just because both pages are from the same domain - hard to know. It does lend some credibility to that theory though. I'm starting to believe it On the other hand, I think this is a pretty reliable test to prove that alt text is ignored for ranking purposes. I can't see how putting it on a different domain would have any other effect.
That's a pretty interesting find, especially considering the amount of talk I've regarding the importance of ALT tags for SEO. Thank you for aking the time to run these experiments and share your results. Quick questions: Not trying to knock your research at all.. just curious because I know little about SEO, and of course want to know more. How conclusive are the details of this experiment? Can the results really be called fact or would broader testing be needed?
hey, lower PR page will most probably rank lower than the PR7 for 2 reasons 1. It has a title that is numerically lower than the other and if Google, when all else fails, uses a directory logic that is what will happen 2. Even though PR is degraded does not mean that it does not have an effect so I would expect them to rank in the PR ranking order However at this morning widgeteroo has disappeared.........