Nearly everyone in the world of search is familar with the examples of "miserable failure" and "click here" - two search terms in which the top results don't contain the search terms and rank solely on the strength of external links pointing to them with the corresponding anchor text. But after reviewing some backlinks pointing to Yahoo! today, I noticed quite a few adult-themed domains and a pattern - the anchor text was always the same... "EXIT"

The websites above are just the tip of the iceberg. It would appear that tens of thousands of links point to Yahoo.com in the same manner. I was curious to see who else might be getting link love of this sort and, lo and behold, it seems that there's an agreement in the world of adult content - Disney, Yahoo, Google & a teen sex information site called Scarleteen all appear to be the focus of "exit" clicks.

Search for:

• Exit at Google
• Exit at Yahoo!
• Exit at MSN
• Exit -intitle:exit at Google

All the engines are pointing to the same group of sites, though the order shifts around. It's interesting, too, to compare the rankings of Disney, specifically - at Google, they're #1, but in the other engines they rank at 5 or lower. My take on this is that "Google-bombing" with anchor text is still easiest to perform at Google. Yahoo! appears to be putting a little more weight into words on the page, as does MSN. Either that, or Google has simply spidered a lot more adult content than its competition.