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How long can a text link be if it should improve
your rankings?
The words that are used in the links to your website have
an effect on the search engine rankings of your website for
these keywords. For example, if very many websites use the
word "blue widget" to link to your website, it is likely
that your website will get a high ranking on Google for the
keyword "blue widget".
How many keywords does Google consider?
It's absolutely certain that Google considers the words
in the links to your site. The question is, how many words
or characters does Google count in a link? Is there an
optimal length for text links? Blogger Shaun Anderson did
a test to
find the answer.
The test set-up
Shaun Anderson created a long text link with 50 nonsense
words. Each of the nonsense words was 6 characters long.
For example, he might have used a link like this:
wergsd
woivsd mliwdc woiuby 3245sc plorxc werxcd ...
Then he added that link to the home page of a website
that has good rankings on Google.
After some time, Shaun did a search for a keyword that
the linked website ranked number one for and added the
nonsense words to the search. By doing so, Google would
only list the site in the search results if links to the
site contained the nonsense word.
For example, if a website has a number one ranking for "buy
used cars in dallas" then the website will only be returned
by Google for "buy used cars in dallas wergsd" if Google
has indexed a link with the text "wergsd" that points to
the website.
The result: the perfect length seems to be 55 characters
Out
of the 50 words in the link text, Google counted eight.
Everything after the eighth word was ignored. Eight words
that consist of six characters make 48 characters. The
seven spaces between these six words add up to a total
of 55 characters.
What does this mean for your website?
You should make sure that the important keywords come
in the first 55 characters of the links that point to your
website.
As many websites use the title of a web page to link to
it, you should also consider the way you write your web
page titles. If your important keywords are at the beginning
of your web page titles, chances are that these keywords
will also be used in the links to your site.
If you want to know if your web page titles are correct
and if you also want to know if all other elements of your
web page are ready for a top 10 ranking on Google, you
should analyze your website now.
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