Visualizing Anchor Text Case Study

Last month I did a rather brief post on visualizing anchor text. It was a developing idea, but found that Wordle.net just cannot deal with the level of data MajesticSEO has, so I thought I would revisit both the theory and look at a better tool for doing this. At the same time, I wanted to highlight how powerful it can be for demonstrating SEO and link development principals.

Now that Majestic has SO MUCH anchor text information in comparison to its competition, we have a new problem properly visualizing a competitor’s anchor text. Take our “standard” report for findaproperty.com. Here’s just the top ten anchor texts, in terms of actual links numbers (regardless of quality):

For me, this is really useful data, but not visually intuitive. However, in the bottom left hand corner of this page, you can instantly download the to anchor texts into a CSV file. You can see what that looks like below.

Now this is data is ordered differently, because it just lists ONE anchor text per referring domain – and the one we list is the one of the strongest page that we know of from within that domain. So this list is infact 376 rows long, instead in this case. (It could be up to 7,500 at the biggest extreme.)

Now you will see that I have marked the anchor text column in red. If you copy the data in that column, and paste it into Tagcrowd where it says “Paste text to be visualized” we get the following:

Now this is MUCH more intuitive, wouldn’t you agree? I can see that this site is about “FINDAPROPERTY”. It is on a .COM domain and allows you to SEARCH for PROPERTY for SALE or to RENT. you can also sort by types of propery – like those with SWIMMING pools, or those in LONDON.

This gives us an excellent visualization of the links to the homepage. However, the technique is even more insightful if you run standard reports on deep link pages. For example, Findaproperty does exceptionally well for the phrase “buy oversees property”:

Now –  note that the page that ranks for Findaproperty is a deep link page. Does MajesticSEO have anchor text for deep linked pages? Absolutely! In fact we have external links from 43 referring domains for this deep link alone…

By doing exactly the same thing… exporting only the strongest anchor text from each domain, we see the following tagloud/tagcrowd:

Now here we can see that this page does have “Buy Overseas Property” related links, but wow… that emphasis is nothing compared to the phrase “International Real Estate”. Now I was fully expecting to go and see Findaproperty ranking number one for that term… but they are nowhere. Then I looked at the on page content and found that in spite of the link text, there is no on page content about International Real Estate. They don’t even use the word “international”:

Now this is valuable information for Findaproperty (please send me a cheque guys…) because they have two ways to improve their organic traffic here. A simple keyword research check will tell them which is more important to them “buy property overseas” or “International Real Estate” as search terms. My guess is that the British would go for the former. Now it looks to me as if all the “international real estate” keyword terms come largely from the “This is” network. Those are sites ultimately controlled by the same master. So ultimately, their destiny is in their own hands. They can either modify the on-page content to try and rank for “International Real Estate” or they could modify the links under their unltimate control, to try top beat “Rightmove” and “Properties Abroad” to the topspot on the phrase “Buy Overseas Property”.

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Dixon Jones

Founder of DHJ Ventures and Founding CEO of Inlinks, Dixon is also the Global Brand Ambassador at Majestic.

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