Does Anchor Text in Links Count When Google Looks at Overall Keywords on the Page?
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So, on our site, we have a list of related blog posts on a page that focuses on bamboo flooring.
These blogs posts have anchor text like "What's the best bamboo flooring?" "How to install bamboo flooring." "Yada yada bamboo flooring yada."
Because the main keyword for the page is bamboo flooring, would the presence of these words within anchor text on the page be considered as keywords on the bamboo flooring page, affecting that page and possibly stuffing within that page?
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Awesome. That's a fantastic way to check. Thank you.
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Here is a quick experiment you can run. Find a page that has the related links on it. Let's say it is...
http://domain.com/bamboo-flooring
Go to google and type in...
site:domain.com/bamboo-flooring "how to install bamboo flooring"
Does Google show the page or not? If they do, then you know Google is counting the anchor text towards the rankings of that page.
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Anchor text and other link-related text will definitely count toward keywords and overall in content, as it's an item on the page. As to whether or not these would push your page toward being seen as stuffed, depends wholly on three things:
- Is the rest of your content heavy with that keyword?
- Do the pages to which they link have content that isn't absolutely related to the topic suggested in the anchor text?
- Are there a lot of links with anchor text like this?
If the answer to any of these questions is "yes", then you may want to reconsider things a touch. The short answer is, yes, the anchor text for links is counted as part of the content of a page, and therefore will effect all aspects to which content can be hinged.
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