When will the search engines start to realize that it’s not the anchor text that counts so much as the text surrounding it? There are billions of great link backs out there from online newspapers, online journals, and respected online communities that point back to web pages using URL’s. Because these back links are straight URL’s, they aren’t getting the weight and credit they are worth.
How about also taking into consideration plain text URL’s that lack the link? There are billions of those lying around the internet giving back no creditability what so ever. These plain text links would be easy to detect with adding a small algorithm to their “spiders”. How hard can it possibly be to pick up on http:// and www and recognize that it is being a reference, or has importance, to the article?
As website owners, we don’t have much say so in how our website is being referenced. Great back links are being left out of the mix because online newspapers and journals are not here to feed your websites food to the search engines. Sometimes if you ask kind enough, high authority sites will allow you to pick your anchor text. Other than that, you are losing out on some great juice you naturally earned.
All I’m saying is give all links, even the little ones, a chance to make an impression for website rankings. There’s a lot of lost juice out there!
While I agree there is a lot of lost possibilities, how would you suggest we take advantage of them?
As it stands right now, only the search engines can give us full advantage over them. Doing a simple search with quotes on Google will allow for us to see where our URL type links are. We would then have to contact every website individually and ask them “pretty please with a cherry on top, will you anchor text my link?” which causes confusion more times than not.
A lot of the larger websites where the most credibility will be received won’t give you the time of day to change your link. Changing takes up time and resources.
It’s important to have plenty of communication between you and your client to be on the up and up of their press releases, media mentions, and other various marketing they are doing on the inside. That way you can optimize as necessary.