Links Questions and advice?

[BobAnderson]

I have a website which has a fair few link assets that are doing very well (a lot of really powerful sites have link to them with follow links) but my commercial pages are not doing as well as a lot of sites without any other investment than (mediocre) links direct to there commercial pages with at least 10% of them carrying the money anchor text.

Even pages we have had a few links for with generalized real anchor text and reasonable links do not do as well as the above due to none of them carrying the money keyword?

Is it me or does google still rely on links to the commercial page and keywords with anchor text to match the money term?

[ClaytonJ]

Dmitri has it covered. Have you read this article about silo links?

http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/silo.htm

There maybe some juice benefit to be passed through to your commercial pages.

[DmitriiK]

Hello, Bob.

Well, links are far not the only one factor, which affects rankings and traffic (which is how well page is doing). So, I'd look at the differences in content, ease of navigation, metas and so on. Basically, everything else, but links.

Now, in regards to your question. Assuming that all non-links factors are the same and the situation you've described still happening, let's look at the correlation study by MOZ.

Scroll to Anchor Text Features and you can see that #of linking domains with exact match is 0.28. If you scroll to Domain-Level Link-Authority Features, then you can see that DA correlation is 0.26, which is lower.

Additionally, it's known that Google does use anchor text heavily (at least for understanding what's on page and at least for natural anchor texts). Also I remember Matt Cutts saying something in a spirit of using anchor texts is very string signal. Can't find that video now though.

So, to sum up, I think there is much more than just links, and yes, anchor text matters.

Hope this helps.