Anchor Text SEO Test Using Unique Keywords
I’m testing if the following home page link with a made up keyword ZEZGoodBud will result in this webpage and the home page ranking for the made up keyword.
We know Google counts anchor text as a ranking factor for both the linked from and linked to webpages, but what happens when there’s multiple links to the same page?
There are at least FOUR home page links from this webpage, there’s two with anchor text SEO Gold (header area, navigation menu), there’s a footer link with anchor text Freelance SEO Consultant and there’s the test text link above with the made up keyword.
The SEO hypothesis to test is does Google pass anchor text SEO benefit through all links to the same page?
If Google does pass anchor text benefit from ALL links we’d expect to find the home page ranking for the made up keyword. A Google search for the made up keyword BEFORE the SEO test went live shows there are ZERO webpages online using the made up keyword.
If Google passes SEO benefit through all links there’s an argument for adding the same link with different anchor text (different keywords) to target more SERPs: if a webpage is important we could add 10 links to it from an article like this and get 10x the SEO benefit! On the other hand if Google only counts one links anchor text there’s no point adding multiple links with different anchor text. We also need to figure out which link Google counts, is it the first link, the last link or a random link???
I have about a dozen private copies of this anchor text SEO test online with various variations and the results are clear.
Google does NOT count the anchor text of multiple links: doesn’t pass ranking benefit to the linked TO page.
Google ONLY counts the anchor text of the first link found in the HTML code: since only the first link counts make sure it’s got perfect anchor text.
So from this webpage only the first of the four home page links counts anchor text wise, the first home page link in the code is the header link at the top with anchor text SEO Gold: that passes ranking benefit to the home page. The three other links appear to be treated by Google as standard body text: Google indexes the text of a text links like the link part doesn’t exist (it’s just text).
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