Recently one of my colleagues showed me that if one searches for the phrase ‘miserable failure’ in Google, the page that shows at the top in the search results is the biography page of George W. Bush at the White House website. If you check the content of the page, there is no phrase ‘miserable failure’ anywhere. First I thought maybe some Google engineer must have played some mischief to rank the page high in Google. However, after doing backlink analysis for the page, I realized that it was the anchor text (link text) which was doing the magic; hundreds of bloggers have linked to Bush’s page using the phrase ‘miserable failure’ as the anchor text. This is a good example of how anchor text can boost Google rankings.
Since anchor text can be used by spammers to trick the search engines, Google’s algorithm also gives importance to other factors such as domain age, link aging and link authority. It is advised not to have the same exact anchor text for all the incoming links to your site; it will be treated as link spamming. You should keep your link profile natural by varying the anchor text.
Postscript: Google has finally defused the Googlebomb which returned the biography page of US President George W. Bush at the top of search results for a search on ‘miserable failure’. For detailed background of Googlebomb, check article by Danny Sullivan.
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