With the changes Google made to how Blogspot links are handled, it was a reasonable concern that they were able to do the same with WordPress.com websites. The original intent of this test was to check actual WordPress.com subdomain websites, however, it was set up the site on the domain and hosted on the same IP range. This will tell us two things about how Google is “filtering” links, by IP range or by domain the link is coming from.
In this test, we check if a link with a generic anchor text from a free WordPress.com site can help or hurt rank.
Transcription below:
And this is the generic anchor text, there's totally no word resolved. There's a starting point is where it was on April 29. And then here, it was pushed back down. I think this one, we could probably stand to actually retest this. Because generic terms are easily like what? click here, visit the website. That's how everyone thinks a generic terms.
In the case of Hunter, you know, this is generic, and it was not, and he's not an SEO. And that's what most people in SIA business owners, not necessarily SEOs, who are just, you know, trying to learn some things that they don't have to, they can gain some things out. But this, to me is not a generic anchor. It's totally unrelated. And I have done some tests where I could actually demote pages for my target keywords by using totally unrelated anchors, something like this. So we're gonna have to redefine what we call a generic anchor, and maybe use entities related to our terms.
For generic anchors, I can tell you right now, I don't build any more of those click here’s and all that stuff, I find that I find that those are all a waste. So I would think the entities thing is the way to go. And I want to redo the generic anchor test to see if that is the case that messed up those tests. Because I kind of expect this to go up, April 29 test results and then May 26, it's down again. And because of the results of the exact match, I think it's the anchor text selection that screwed this test up a little bit.