Building Links

Republished from Oct 20, 2008 – As this post is getting talked about in forums at the moment I thought I’d bring to the front of the blog so comments can be added if you wish :)

Anchor Text Optimisation

As a seo I wanted to know – how many words or characters does Google count in a link? What’s best practice when creating links – internal, or external? What is the optimal length of a HTML link?

It appears the answer to the question ‘how many words in a text link” is 55 characters, about 8-10 words.

Why is this important to know?

  1. You get to understand how many words Google will count as part of a link
  2. You can see why you should keep titles to a maximum amount of characters
  3. You can see why your domain name should be short and why urls should be snappy
  4. You can see why you should rewrite your urls (SEF)
  5. It’s especially useful especially when thinking about linking internally, via body text on a page.

I wanted to see how many words Google will count in one ‘link’ to pass on anchor text power to a another page so I did a test a bit like this one below;

  1. pointed some nonsense words in one massive link, 50 words long, at the home page of a ‘trusted’ site
  2. each of the nonsense words were 6 characters long
  3. Then I did a search for something generic that the site would rank no1 for, and added the nonsense words to the search, so that the famous “This word only appear in links to the site” (paraphrase) kicked in
  4. This I surmised would let me see how many of the nonsense words Google would attribute to the target page from the massive 50 word link I tried to get it to swallow.

Using a character calculator tool the answer was…..

  1. Google counted 8 words in the anchor text link out of a possible 50.
  2. It seemed to ignore everything else after the 8th word
  3. 8 words x 6 characters = 48 characters + 7 spaces = a nice round and easy to remember number – 55 Characters.

So, a possible best practice in number of words in an anchor text might be to keep a link under 8 words but importantly under 55 characters because everything after it is ignored (in the link)?

Linkbuilding

This of course has an impact in writing your titles for pieces you want linked to – especially for those with a habit of taking the article title and linking it to the page. Most are aware a title should be under 70 characters to have maximum impact in Google. From a test I did, Google ignored words in a title after 70+ characters. But if Google only attributes the first 55 characters in a link, does this mean there’s at least a 10-20 character no-man’s land to consider when creating links & headlines?

All the more reason to have important keywords at the beginning of your page title, and your brand name at the very end?

If you like this test, you might like;

  1. Will Google Rank Pages Better With Valid Code?
  2. How Many Words Will Google Count In The Title Tag?
  3. A Google Friendly Website Navigation System
  4. Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimisation

Addendum

If people used the title of this page to link to this article, which is preferable, (Limit Anchor Text Links Under 55 Characters In Length? (I’ve tweaked this again)) – that’s 54 characters, within measured tolerance. But because of my website URL structure and length, I might be losing out if people link to the article using the URL. (http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/anchor-text-length/) – unfortunately that’s over 60 characters, with Google *possibly* ignoring the rich keywords at the end of the link :(

What do you think about this anchor text optimisation observation?

Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)