I have been testing this for a while... Has anyone else noticed that since July's algo shift, Yahoo! has been giving a more significant amount of weight to anchor text for your BLs? I have one page that has less than half of the BLs of the number 10 site in the SERPs, yet it ranks first. The only difference between the two is that I have varying non-reciprocal BLs, but all still have the keyword in the anchor text. The second reason I think this is the case is this: The site I am optimizing is to my niche what coffee.com would be to the coffee market. So lets say the niche is widgets. Well. In June, I ranked #1 for the term widgets with my site widgets.com, however, since the algo shift, I have dropped to number 6, and as near as I can tell it is because most of the links pointing at widgets.com have the anchor text, "widgets.com." It is my estimation that if more of those links simply read "widgets" instead of "widgets.com" I would jump back up to #1. Thus causing me to believe in a second case that BL anchor text has become more important. Anyone else noticing this?
One of my sites ranks first in yahoo, and google as well, for a keyword which is not even on the page, including the title and description meta. I did however, use that keyword as anchor text when gaining backlinks. Whether or not yahoo is giving more weight now than before, I do not know.