I read a post by Bill Slawski about an enhancement to anchor text for inbound links. Instead of using the anchor text itself, it uses surrounding text. The implications if it’s in use are tremendous.
Google’s John Mueller recently answered a question about whether anchor text was still a ranking factor. Mueller’s answer focused on outbound anchor text within outbound links on a site, instead of the inbound links.
John Mueller affirmed that Google uses anchor text. But he kind of walked around the ranking factor part of the question, maybe because he was answering the question from the point of view of outbound links.
Is Anchor Text a Ranking Factor?
The question posed to John Mueller was specifically about the anchor text on inbound links. There are many views on how Google uses it, with the dominant theory since 2013 being that too many anchor text can result in a manual action or lower rankings.
Here is the question:
“Is anchor text still an important ranking factor in 2019? Lots of companies have made studies that they pointed out there’s no correlation. So I don’t know, and there’s a link to a Google patent.”
John Mueller Confirms Usefulness of Anchor Text
Mueller’s answer begins by confirming that Google uses anchor text but he stops short of commenting on it’s use as a ranking factor for inbound links.
“With regards to anchor text in general we do use it… It’s something that we do pick up. It’s a great way to give us context about a link. In particular within your website.”
Mueller then continues his answer in the context of anchor text on internal links:
“I would continue to look at the anchor text that you use, especially internally within your website and try to make sure that you’re providing anchor text in a way that is really useful, provides context to what is linked of the other page.”
He goes on to discuss linking to products within a website and so on. Clearly his answer about anchor text is predominantly about internal links.
The important takeaway is that Google does use anchor text, but that Mueller was a little circumspect about details, and rightfully so.
However, Bill Slawski may have discovered an interesting clue. More about that further down.
Breaking the Anchor Text Paradigm
There are several competing ideas about what to do about anchor text. Most articles state that using anchor text is potentially dangerous. But they recommend using anchor text anyway.
A recent article recommends against using anchor text in bulk. It recommends a modest use of anchor text in relation to branded anchor text.
Another article I read recommends making your anchor text look “natural” by studying what the anchor text distribution of your competitors are.
Both kinds of articles acknowledge that using anchor text for inbound links has potential for danger. Yet both explicitly recommend the use of anchor text.
Neither kind of article suggests an alternative to the anchor text paradigm. They both affirm it. It’s as if the SEO industry is locked into this anchor text box and they are afraid of letting it go.
What may be missing for breaking the anchor text paradigm is the clue that Bill Slawski recently discovered.
Virtual Anchor Text
The role of anchor text has always been about understanding what the page that is being linked to is about. But nowadays, so is the content.
Bill Slawski recently noticed that an older anchor text patent had something new added to it.
What was added seems to be a way to create a virtual anchor text.
Bill Slawski Confirms Use of Surrounding Text for Anchor Meaning
I asked Bill if this is about using surrounding text to extract meaning about that link.
Yes, it appears to work that way.
I asked Bill how likely is this algorithm method to be in use:
What stood out to me was that it was in updated patent claims from a. Old Jeff Dean patent.
I take those as stronger evidence that a process described has likely been put into action.
This seems to me to be an important clue about why branded anchor text seem to work for rankings. Branded anchors are anchor text that consists of the company name, the brand name.
If this is true, then it’s not the anchor text powering those branded anchors, but the surrounding text that was powering the anchor text, working like a virtual anchor text.
Bill and Google calls it Annotation Text
The way it’s described, it works like a virtual anchor text. It’s not anchor text, but it works like an anchor text.
What the patent does is to associate the surrounding text that is located within a certain distance of the anchor text, with the outbound link. So instead of using the anchor text itself (which may be “click here” the algorithm could use surrounding text.
The keywords chosen from the surrounding text is described in the patent as text that is relevant to what the page is about and to what the page being linked to is about.
Thus, there’s a relevance match between the page that is linking, to the text that surrounds the outbound link, to the page that is being linked to and also to the search query.
Here’s the section of the patent that Bill noticed was added to the original patent:
“…identifying, in the source document, annotation text, the annotation text being text within a predetermined distance of an outbound link to a target document and the annotation text including at least one term…”
The above means identifying text that is a certain distance away from an outbound link. The word annotation means descriptive text clarifies a text. That could be a reference to title that is added to a link. Or it could be a reference to the words that directly precede or follow the anchor text.
Here is where the patent discusses the distance of the descriptive text from the anchor text.
“Identifying text in the page that’s located within a set distance from an outbound link that contains at least one keyword that is relevant to the page that is linking out and also relevant to the page being linked to.”
Then this part of the patent describes how this keyword is relevant to the page and to the page that is being linked to:
“storing in the index an association between the term and the source document, storing in the index, responsive to identifying the annotation text, an association between the term and the target document”
Now this part is about making a connection between a search query and a page that is relevant to that query because the query appears near a link to that page from another page that is relevant for the topic.
“identifying, responsive to receiving a query that includes the term, the source document and the target document as associated with the term in the index…”
This is the entire paragraph:
“…identifying, in the source document, annotation text, the annotation text being text within a predetermined distance of an outbound link to a target document and the annotation text including at least one term, storing in the index an association between the term and the source document, storing in the index, responsive to identifying the annotation text, an association between the term and the target document, identifying, responsive to receiving a query that includes the term, the source document and the target document as associated with the term in the index, responsive to identifying the associations, including the source document and the target document in a list of documents responsive to the query, and returning the list of documents responsive to the query as a search result for the query.”
Is Surrounding Text a Virtual Anchor Text?
It’s important to point out that just because something is patented does not mean it is being used by Google.
One reason why Google might use this kind of analysis is because people frequently link with click here. The sentences immediately preceding or following the “click here” anchor text can often provide meaningful context to that link. So it kind of makes sense for Google to use surrounding text as a virtual version of anchor text.
Watch the Webmaster Hangout about Anchor Text Here
Read Bill Slawski’s post about Annotated text here.
Images by Shutterstock, Modified by Author
