Do keywords in a URL that's linkified provide anchor text benefits?
-
I'm curious about links that are just URLs (e.g. http://www.google.com/reader) or in a URL-like format (e.g. Google.com/Reader) vs links with plain-word anchor text (e.g. Google Reader).
If a link that is just a URL (or a partial URL) has keywords in it, do those keywords provide anchor text relevance benefits?
I'm particularly thinking about URL shorteners that provide customized links, and social media. Many web tools (twitter, blog comment systems) don't render HTML but will automatically link URLs. If http://boston.craigslist.org/jjj/ gets linked to through custom shortened URLs like http://bit.ly/Boston-Jobs, is it more likely to rank for the term "Boston Jobs" than if it received the same number of links using a non-custom shortened URL like http://bit.ly/ejq5uX9?
-
I'm aware redirected links won't provide as much benefit as direct links -- I'm looking purely at relevance benefits from the anchor text. Shortened URLs seem like a good case because it separates the on-site benefit of having the keyword in the URL from the off-site benefit of being linked to with a URL that has the keyword in it.
The question that really sums it up (editing the main question to reflect it) is: If http://boston.craigslist.org/jjj/... gets linked to through custom shortened URLs like http://bit.ly/Boston-Jobs, is it more likely to rank for the term "Boston Jobs" than if it received the same number of links using a non-custom shortened URL like http://bit.ly/ejq5uX9 ?
-
You are in reality talking about two different kind of situations.
In the first one (URL used as anchor text), yes, if the URL is keyword optimized, then it will work also as partial keyword matching anchor text. That is one of the reasons why us SEOs always preach for SEF URLs and suggesting to use the primary keyword while crafting the URLs.
In the second case (shortened URLs), remember that those kind of URLs are 301 to the real one, therefore we can suppose that can work still as partial matching anchor text, but surely they are loosing some of their power because of the redirection.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I understand Authorship is Dead, but here's a question on the Google+ Profile
I guest write for some blogs, as well as several blogs I manage myself. What is the correct usage of the "Contributor to" field and the "Links" field? Contributor to: The overall blog itself and; Links: To individual blog posts themselves? Or the reverse? Thank you!
Social Media | | booboo220 -
Authorship Implementation - Is it needed to place Rel='Publisher' on every page on eCommerce
Hi, On my eCommerce site I've placed rel='publisher' only on the homepage and rel='author' on all of the article pages. Is that the way to do it? Do I need to add rel='publisher' also on the article pages besides for rel='author'? P.S
Social Media | | BeytzNet
Even though I placed rel='publisher' only on the homepage, when I use Google's test tool (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets) I see my publisher ID also on product category pages (that don't have publisher nor author on them but do have regular +1 buttons). How is that? (bacuase of the +1 button)1 -
Need people's opinion on if this is good advice for link building
What google wants is authority, relevancy, quality and engagement. If you have an authority in your niche and place relevant content on your website plus grammar free, unique and a lot of words, and social influence via Twitter, Facebook, Google +... You shouldn't be worried about the speed of building back links. I checked your website and it seems like an authority site. PR5, 18K backlinks plus $38K SE free traffic (according to SEMrush)... You just need a social influence to boost your authority. Create Twitter, Facebook, Google+ accounts for this website and also Facebook and Google+ pages. Then Create 30 web 2.0 accounts and on each one post three articles. Two of them are an account activation (this is what I call it), which can be just grabbed from ezinearticles and spun. Keep the links to the articles at the bottom of the pages. Once your web 2.0 sites are indexed by Google publish 800+ words quality relevant content with two links to your website. One to your root domain and one to the most relevant page your website (I mean relevant to the 800+ words article). Do this on each of those 30 web 2.0 sites. After this blast all of the 800+ articles with all kind of backlinks. Forum profiles, blog comments, article directories... Just use Senuke and other software. And don't forget to create a facebook fan page for each of the web 2.0 sites. In one month, you'll see a heck of a move in rankings. Where does the bookmarking part go? You need to bookmark every single URL you want Google to see. And if you want to outsource it, I highly recommend you to get a full time VA who would do this for you. Hope it helps. And your answer to your question about speed, if your site is older than 3 months don't care about the speed. Care about the quality.
Social Media | | newcitymoving0 -
Is it ok to have 'Authors' that write content for multiple sites even if in the same industry?
Hi all, I have a client that has 2 websites (different brands) in the same industry. I have encouraged them to become authors when writing content for each respective website and hook up their Google+ profile to the posts. Is this detrimental for SEO if they are writing for both sites? Or is it in fact a positive thing? Looking forward to your thoughts on this!! Thanks, Elias
Social Media | | A_Q0 -
Google+'s +1 for business....
I'm thinking (and I could be wrong) that eventually the number of people that have +1'd a site will begin to impact search results. After all, it is Google's platform. What are your thoughts on this? And do you know if having someone +1 your site is different than having them "follow" you or add you to their circles? Should a business have more followers or +1's?
Social Media | | juliaritz0 -
URL's for videos to increase page value and social sharing value
Hello Everyone, We recently developed videos for all of our products. Upon clicking on each video, we have the video popping up in a lightbox. The videos are hosted on Amazon s3. We would like to implement social sharing for each video and to do so, we are going to have the video load on each page upon being clicked using jquery. My question is how we should structure the urls so that the actual product page gets the share value. So for example, if the page is www.website.com/product1.aspx should we have the video be www.website.com/product1.aspx#video and ensure there is a canonical url on each product page so that the benefit is given to www.website.com/product1.aspx Or is there another way that anyone would recommend doing this? The videos are AMAZING and I'd like to ensure that as these videos are shared on social networks, that the value of the share is directed to the actual product page. Any ideas mozzers? Thanks!
Social Media | | eric_since1910.com0 -
Is there a way on OSE or any other site to find the 50 most socially shared URLs on a given domain?
I'd love to see which URLs on a specific domain get socially shared the most. I know I can use OSE to say figure out exactly how much social sharing has happened on let's say this URL:
Social Media | | Almonds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama But what if I want to figure out the top 50 most shared URLs across all of wikipedia.org. Is that possible on OSE or anywhere else? If not, do you have some ideas on how something similar could be achieved?0