I've been struggling quite a bit with my website: www.killerfilm.com. It's a horror film review site, I have quite a few writers, a programmer, and me the programmer/marketer/seo guy. You'd think with that sort of team, and 400 pages, updated daily I could pull down more than 100 uniques/day. But then while digging through my analytics I discovered something crazy. We got massive hits for keywords involving "Cloverfield", the new J. J Abrams movie. We haven't even done a review on it, yet we were ranking third in google for "Cloverfield Review". I dugg around and found that one of my writers had posted a summary of my competitors review, and linked to it. But more importantly he had titled it "A funny Cloverfield Review". Here is the part I screwed up. Typically, its been our trademark to let our writers come up with crazy titles and jokes. In order to prevent this from affecting our SEO much, I make it so the anchor text of the link from the main page is not the title of the page itself (aka inside the title tags). Also, on all back pages the review is linked with anchor text of the films actual name...not the zany ridiculous title. But this one 200 word news item, that contained the link text "Cloverfield Review" actually got the most organic hits of all. The other organic hits are from months old items, which as it turns out, also had the title of the film in the link text. The Revelation: Link weight and passing is done on a page to page level, not just a site to site level. It doesn't matter if on all back pages my reviews had link text with the name of the film. It only mattered what the links name was on the front page. The reason: My front page has the majority of high authority links pointing to it. The smaller back end pages are passing a tiny bit of authority for the proper keywords...but I've already shot myself in the foot by passing nonsense keyword weight from my most authoritative page. This also goes to show that anchor text value is extremely high. It hardly seems to matter if my title tags, alt image text, keyword density, and everything all are perfectly compliant with SEO standards...the anchor text pointing from my main page to the review in its first few days of existence permanently brands it in the eyes of search engines. I'm sure some of you may have already known these things already, but I thought I just might share the observations of someone who is still learning. For other fellow newbies out there, always check your analytics and traffic reports! They can be the key to unraveling all your problems. For the next month I will ask my writers to write their reviews with anchor text "MOVIE NAME review by AUTHOR". I'll post back on this thread over the coming weeks with the results.
you learned something from it which is the important part. this the nature of SEO, some we learn from reading and the rest is from trial & error or from previous actions.
As promised an update to this SEO anecdote . After implementing the change in anchor text, and a few other site changes (not particularly SEO oriented), the site has amazingly gone from 100 uniques/day to nearly 900, just 21 days later. Come to think of it...being a horror review site I should have updated '28 days later', but ah well. It is quite honestly amazing how one little SEO component can be that serious.