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Don’t Click Here: The Power of Referring Link Text
By Matt Keough | May 31, 2007
Content is king. You have heard it time and time again. And it is true in most cases. But there are rare exceptions and they illustrate how content optimized for search engines and inbound links are two complementary elements to obtain search engine rankings.
Do a search on Google for “click here”. What is the first result? An Acrobat download page. If content is king, he allows links to play in his kingdom. Clicking on the cached version of the page shows that “click here” appears nowhere on the page. “These terms only appear in links to this page…”, Google tells us!
How did that happen? Many websites offering pdf documents say “Requires Acrobat Reader click here to download” – and you can guess the linked text. This practice is so widespread, that Acrobat OWNS the search phrase “click here”. They are welcome to it, by the way. But just how many links does it take to get first place on Google with no content to match? The numbers vary. Do a link: operator on Google. Google will tell you there are 34 sites linking to that page.
Try a link: operator on Yahoo! – it redirects to Site Explorer. Counting referring links from outside their domain gets you ten million plus.
Huh? How could Google miss ten million inlinks? They didn’t miss them. They just do not care to share them to any old passerby. If you verify with Google that you have control over a site – or at least the owner of the site agrees to share control – you can get a much better picture of the true number and nature of links pointing into that website. They even share with you the most popular text strings of inbound links.
If you have done a good job of putting good content on your website and you still are not as high as you would like to be on the search engine results page, look at how others are linking to you. If they all have your website’s name in the text link, consider asking for a modification to include a keyword or two. You can also do the heavy lifting and create html code snippets that contain the words you would like. Oh! And don’t forget to also create that great content that will actually encourage someone to link to you in the first place!
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