Why Does Google Love This?

[ktaylor310]

Awhile back I started reading in seo circles that Google was putting a lot more weight on text surrounding links. It's a little outdated now, but SEOmoz ranked it as "high importance" and had a "high consensus" among seo'ers.

A couple of months ago I decided to experiment with one of my most competitive sites. We added a paragraph to our home page and incorporated a text link with our keywords "credit card machines" into a sentence where that link was close to the words "small business". Very quickly we rose to top rankings on Google and MSN for "small business credit card machines", "credit card machines for small business", etc., and it has stuck. To make matters even better, Google chose the entire sentence as the description in their search results. aaahhh Google love

Thoughts?? Does our success back up this theory or were we just in the right place at the right time?

[Limozine]

Interesting information. Thanks for sharing.

[TryUsOut]

It is really hard to tell at this point. If Google changed their algo to contribute to that result, then I'd better get busy adjusting our sites as well

Do keep us posted for any development buddy.

[SashaMike]

Your find is excellent but at this point it seems to be a theory and not a fact. I will experiment this as well, and if 3-5 of fellow members see positive change then i guess we can market that.

Cheers

[simonr]

ktaylor - how much competition is there for that as a search term? If there's not much my guess would be that it's simply because of that....?

Simon

[ktaylor310]

Highly competitive. I'm not looking at this as a "magic trick", I don't believe in that. It just makes sense to me that Google, in their ongoing efforts to weed out spam, would consider text around links valuable since it gives them a better picture of whether the link is relevant to the page or spam.

[puti1]

There are just too many elements in google's algo. But i tend to agree that text that surrounds keyword is one of the more important factor.

[acwebguru]

Good and original content should be used in this purpose. One should not copy and paste the text of other website otherwise; Google might penalize it. Though SEO depends of zillions of other issues, it is a fact that search engines are giving priority to text links.

[khaty]

I know that Google based their SERPs on many factors, first the keywords included in one website, second how many link juice/backlinks does this website has, third unique and fresh content and fourth the age of the website. Google's SERPs always changed from time to time.

[fairdoes]

Do you find that surrounding text is better than the text IN the link?