Does Ranking Always Catch Up to Allinanchor?

I have a number of competitive keywords on which I've done a good deal of internal linking using the keywords and have started an aggressive backlink effort as well (I've also done a good deal of on-page stuff). For each of them, my allinanchor score (from McDar) is well ahead of my ranking (site is www.trichys.com). For instance, for the keyword "extranet", the allinanchor is 18, while my ranking is 475. For other competitive terms, I have allinanchor as high as 2, while my rankings are between 20 and 30.

Can I expect my rankings to get close to my allinanchor score at some point? I know this was discussed at great length in the great "sleeping bags" experiment. Wanted to know whether that would shed any light on my current situation.

 

I agree with Shawn. The correlation between allinanchor: and SERP placement is not complete or absolute.

But there maybe other things that are effecting the divergence between your results. The one is the sandbox effect. If you have added a lot of the links, that are driving your allinanchor results, over the last few month these links may be in the "sandbox" and you may not see their impact for a while.

 

I realize that allinanchor isn't the only component of Google's complex algorithm, but I thought that the gospel is "anchor text is what drives results" on competitive terms. I've already done the standard on-page stuff, which results in good rankings in Yahoo and MSN, but hasn't done bubkis in Google (for less competitive terms, I rank well, as the on-page stuff is enough). I was hoping that allinanchor could be used as a proxy for how I'm doing on the anchor-text front.

I guess I'm trying to figure out if there's a point when you're pretty confident that the rankings will improve, based on allinanchor, allintext, good on-page, etc. It seemed that there were pretty immediate results with the sleeping bag experiment (at least initially).

Sorry for being so anal about this; I have a handful of keywords that drive most of the relevant traffic for my business, and I've not yet managed to get them to rank in Google to a level where it makes a difference.

 

Well Google is a bit of a bitch right now. You're not the only one having trouble getting well placed int he SERPs.

 

I always thought their prime objective was to give people web pages that are relevant to what they are searching on. There are a lot of people suggesting that they are not doing this very well at the moment.

I think that most of the people practicing SEO believe that the pages they are optimizing are relevant for the keyword and phrases that they are optimizing for. They realize that only 10 sites can make it to the top of the list, nonetheless they think that their sites are as relevant as anyone elses, and they are prepared to work hard to get their relevant site in front of the public.

If Google is sacrificing relevance, in some attempt to keep SEO practitioners off balance, then I think they have lost site of their mission, and may start to lose their users.

 

The SEOed websites might be relevant but often they are exceptionally commercial in nature.

They have to do something to make it somewhat challenging or confusing otherwise the serps would just continue to degrade over time.

If they make it hard to manipulate artificially then eventually many SEOs may shift to other jobs or make sites that have a better message and do a better job of spreading naturally.

 

But it is only the commercial web sites that really care about being found. And if someone is seaching on "buy widgets online" they are hardly looking for non profit "the history of widgets" sites, or Stanford University's Widgets 101 course.

Why would they degrade? That is a very jaundiced view of SEO isn't it. Maybe they would get more relevant, at least for people looking for commercial sites.

If you go down to the Mall do you want the first ten location you come to to be libraries and museums. No, of course not. You're looking for some business who has the product you're interested in buying today.

Sure and all the brick and mortar merchants will stop advertising and be perfectly happy with the dead end location in the Mall, because they would just like to have people find then "naturally".

 

I think google is struggling with their rankings in some aspects of search, but overall they are still doing a fine job. Im just a little pissed Im #1 allinanchor for all of my terms though I only show up #1 for about half..

 

I happen to have a good friend on the Virtual Library maintainers council who disagrees with this statement.

people wanting to "buy widgets online" surely are looking to buy widgets, where the problem comes into effect is when people are looking for info and can find nothing but "buy widgets online." the disproportionate percentage of commercial sites is a bit out of hand in some high margin markets.

Temporary degrades are better than a continual slow decline.

Froogle and AdWords are for shopping. Google is for finding information. At least that is how Google's business model is built.

 

Some of your forum members, like myself, might disagree with you there.

I've certainly found this to be the most relevant and helpful "search engine forum" that I have come across.

 

As someone who runs a commercial site, though I'm clearly trying to "win" the manipulation game, it's only for terms that are extremely relevant to what my company does and the content I provide to visitors. If Google's results only showed truly relevant sites, and my sites didn't rank in top few, I could handle it better than losing out to a bunch of crap that's not relevant by any stretch of the imagination. When I see true "authority"/non-commerical sites ranking above me, I don't mind a bit. All of my "manipulation" is really just an attempt to get to where I think I should be in the first place.

 

Presumably everyone reading this is interested in SEO. But that is, quite obviously, a biased sample of the web-site-maintaining world. Of the total number of web sites at any given moment, I'd reckon that only a fairly small fraction represents commercial interests, even "secondary" commercial interests like being able to make a non-negligible income off simple advertising rental.

It is very easy to forget all the Toms and Janes and Freds and Alices with noncommercial sites. OK, some of them would augment the sum of the universe's esthetic quotient by disappearing--but let us never lose sight of the reality that an awful lot of those sites are not only decent, in the sense of providing informative or entertaining content on their subject, but are the product of massive amounts of sweat investment by their owners. And all for the fun of it, not for a buck.

Moreover, those sites tend to be, outside of a few specialist subjects, the backbone of all noncommercial information on the web. But the tail wags the dog: the (relatively) low percentage of frankly commercial ventures tend to dominate the SERPs on all sorts of subjects and topics, even when there are numerous Tom/Jane sites that could provide more and more useful information on most of those topics. But Tom and Jane have probably never heard of SEO, and would scarcely know what to do if they had--and, above all, they cannot afford to put cash into their sites.

The upshot of this not-surprising situation is that when Fred and Mary go to look, using some big-name SE, for the information that Tom and Jane have so laboriously prepared, they likely will not find it, because the topic is dimly peripheral to the marketing of widget or wonkles, so some widget and wonkle makers own the subject in the SERPs. I certainly know for myself that when I go looking for good information on any of many subjects, I need to be prepared to go through most of the hits on tens or dozens of SERPs pages to find some real information.

This is not, I venture to say, what the creators of the web had in mind, nor wwhat anyone really wants. I am not here denigrating commercial interests: a hard-working person wants and deserves reward. But what we need, and I have no clear and clever ideas to suggest, is some way to keep the matters reasonably segregated, so that the Toms and Janes can have their useful and entertaining sites and pages found without the need to drill 13 pages deep into SERPs, yet the commercial interests can be reasonably assured of getting their products before potential buyers.

Perhaps separating the web world into Google and Froogle (or something along those lines) is an answer. The Google would downplay commercial sites without actually leaving them out, and the Froogle would emphasize commercial elements without actually leaving the amateurs aside. Thus, an especially outstanding site of one sort or the other could still be found on the "other" side, but searchers could focus on what kind of site it is that they're looking for just by where or how they look.

In any event, something has to be done soon.