Less Emphasis on Anchor Text

I have read the google has changed its algorithm. Now it not giving much emphasis on anchor text which is the one of the biggest ranking factor.

Is it true ?

 

i think anchor text has always been an important factor, its what tells google if your site is important for that keyword

 

Anchor text is great for webmasters, but is it realistic. Do most people who arent web masters or SEOers actually use anchor text?

I think quite a lot of people use the actual URL in the anchor, or even words like 'here', 'click this', '$theSiteName'

Is Google really looking for links that webmasters have created? Or real links that have been created naturally by people linking to good/useful content?

I think this is a good idea for Google, but makes it so much harder for webmasters

 

That's what I read as well but I think it's all just based on observations and theory. In fact, there's actually no official statement made by google staff about this and it's up to us to believe what we want.

 

I think the anchor text is important, but Google also "looks" at the text surrounding the link which is why an in-content link is much more effective than say a blogroll or footer link.

 

I agree completely, it’s important to have relevant text around your links. And I don’t think just a few words will do. Possible a few hundred word relevant words in phrases and your text slap bang in the middle will really boost the relevance of the link

 

Kentucky, I believe you are absolutely correct. I'll know in a few weeks, because I just spent several days going through my entire website, page by page. I turned plain text on each page into a variety of contextually relevant in-text links to other pages of my website. I did this for all 160 pages. And of course I used relevant anchor text in each of these internal links.

I will be watching my stats carefully over the next month or so to see if these new in-content links make a difference as the various search engines discover them in their regular crawls.

 

Anchor Text is the second most important SEO element.

 

Text surrounding the link is important, as well as other onpage factors such as the domain/URL, page title, h tags, outbound links, etc. Anchor text is useful, but if you view some of the top sites in competitive niches, there are few backlinks with proper anchor text usage (percentage). In that case I believe Google relies more heavily on onpage SEO factors while determining and scoring the relevancy of your backlinks.

Look at it this way. If you have a blog, and you want to point people to this thread, will you link to "webmaster forum" or "Digital Point." You might even link to "this Digital Point thread." Linking directly to the company name is more natural, and I believe holds a higher trust factor.

 

Some really good points in this thread. If anyone has used google personalized search, you would know how important the surrounding text is to define the 'context' of the page. Anchor text has always been very important.