I just read an article discussing the shifting trend of search engines moving away from anchored text in ranking pages for content.

Google, for the longest time has been leading the charge against search engine optimization and this is just another attempt at trying to eliminate it altogether.  They’ve long held the position that SEO should not exist. It is their belief that everything should just be “natural”.

The problem that a lot of SEO guru’s have with this shift is that, if they are successful, it is possible that we will see a lot of mom and pop sites with no business ranking in search engines, crawling their way to the top.  Fortunately, this has been a competition between Google and search engine optimists for some time and when Google changes their algorithm, the industry always adjusts.

If you’re not sure what anchor text is, below is an example taken from the Wikipedia page discussing anchor text.

Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination. The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, a hyperlink to the English-language Wikipedia’s homepage might take this form:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a>

The anchor text in this example is “Wikipedia”; the unwieldy URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page displays on the web page as Wikipedia, contributing to clean, easy-to-read text.

So, in short, anchor text basically is the text that users select when following a link to another page or site.

The theory behind using anchor text initially was that it would tell search engines what a specific site was about and how “relevant” it was when stacked side-by-side against similar sites.  When you visit imSAM from another site, you might click on a link that says SEO guru or affordable web design for your small business.

The reason search engines are even considering removing it from their computations is because of link spammers.  You’ve likely seen sites that have tens, hundreds or maybe thousands of anchor-texted links that look like such.

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…and the list goes on and on.

In reality, I’m not wholly opposed to this shift as link spamming is at the very least, annoying and on its best day, completely out of control however the impact of such a dramatic shift will have a negative affect on sites whose optimization campaign relies on this practice.

We’ll continue to watch this and other shifting trends in the search engine marketplace and adjust as necessary.

No get back to work!

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Here are some additional stats that I found on Facebook.

• Facebook has more than 150 million users
• Facebook is the 4th most visited site on the web
• 84% of Facebook users are under the age of 35
• 48% of users return each day
• Users spend an average of 25.2 minutes on Facebook per day
• Facebook sees 61.3 billion page views per month
• Facebook is the #1 photo sharing site
• 3 times more people are invited through the event application on Facebook than www.evite.com

It is noteworthy to point out that not everyone has had a positive experience with Facebook ads when compared to Google’s very popular alternative, Adwords.