Back in February 2009 when the original Google brand update or “Vince update” hit the US there was a lot of talk regarding why this had happened and how long the results would last. In the UK the original update was not a heavily influence in rankings although a few new sites made an appearance in the top 10, these sites would be considered “big brands”. Now after a month or two of this activity all things seemed to return to normal and these big brands returned to the lower depths from where they had risen.

However around the beginning of June 2009 the results in one particular high value industry (travel insurance) changed overnight to match the results seen in the USA back in February. Sites that had been in the top 10 for years all of a sudden have been forced into the depths of pages 2 and 3 being replaced with well known high street brands. I have collected some data which some of you may find interesting if you work in this industry, even if you don’t it’s worth taking note because this sort of activity seems to be spreading.

This first table shows a snap shot of the top 40 websites that rank under the term “travel insurance”, the results are compared from the start of June to the 6^th of July. A green arrow indicates a positive increase, red showing a negative drop and a green plus symbol indicating a new entry.

• Some sites worth mentioning:

• Post Office moving from position 12 to number 1

• Tesco’s moving from position 20 to number 7

• Essential Travel, Go Travel Insurance and more massively dropping

The next diagram actually shows the rankings over the last 5 months for the term “travel insurance”. In this diagram you can clearly see that this update has hugely effected the landscape in this industry.

I have heard this is happening for other financial terms too such as “car insurance” and Job related terms

Ok, I thought I’d go back to basics for some beginner SEO’s and those who take an interest in the subject. Anchor text is the name given to the text of a link or a link description, for example in the link SEO Blog, the anchor text is “SEO Blog”.

The anchor text on any website is completely editable and can provide some great SEO value from inside a website and from external websites as well. Essentially the best practice to use in any situation is to provide the most accurate description of what the link destination is as possible. Use the image below as guidance, so for example “Johns Cars” website had 3 important pages about; car engines, types of wheels and cars for sale.

Now what’s important within the internal structure of Johns Cars is what kind of anchor text is used to link to these pages. What you should try and avoid in the setup of your navigation or links within content using unrelated anchor text to link to a page. Terms such as “click here” and “this link” don’t really provide any useful description of what’s at the destination or what users should expect.

If you provide a good description of a page explaining what users can accurately expect to see once they arrive at the link destination then you’re optimising your internal link structure successfully. By doing this you are letting the search engines know what’s on the page, making the destination more relevant to a page with just a “click here” link. See the diagram below to show how internal anchor texts should be used:

SEO pour des informations sur la page. Pourtant, il off page SEO variations EUR notables dans différents conteneurs et “cibles, vous verrez seulement le trafic à l’aide à long also mot-clé queue de plus naturel et ne sont pas à classer par ordre L’.

This type of method also applies to external links i.e. backlinks. In an ideal world you would aim to have hundreds or even thousands (depending how greedy you were) of links with accurate anchor texts pointing to your content. Google and the other search engines use the anchor text to help determine how useful pages are, and rank them accordingly (this is only a fraction of the ranking algorithm). The only problem is, you have no legitimate way of controlling what anchor text is used to point to your website. What we don’t really want again is phrases such as “this site” or “check this out” – although a link is a link and beggars can’t be choosers!

As the diagram indicates above although these links are pointing to Johns Cars they are not really providing any real added value in terms of anchor text. They are not telling the search engines or users what content should be expected on the website. Not to go too far into detail about getting the correct anchor texts as there are ways such as paid links and link bait but essentially any external links should ideally be keywords you are trying to rank for, so in Johns case, “Cars for sale”, “Types of wheels” and “Car engines”.