Update To MSN Algo: Anchor Text

[peter_d]

Aaron gives his views on the Yahoo Update. He suspects anchor text is now a lot more important.

(I'll provide a link in due course, his site appears to be down at the time of writing)

* anchor text got A LOT more weighting
* many lower authority links that were not passing weight (due to not being in their index) are passing weight. For some competitive core industry related phrases (not SEO, another industry) I see a site that went from #150 to top 5 based on the anchor text of lots of low authority links.
* fresh links are still heavily trusted, but sites with older links but few fresh links now rank a bit better than they used to in the older MSN, likely due to the more comprehensive index coverage. for as much as Google has beat down some directory links, MSN just gave them a lot of love.
* MSN is still screwing up some navigational queries. For example, my homepage does not rank for seobook. Though I have already seen them fix some of these issues.
* Internal anchor text still counts, but it might seem slightly demoted, as a side effect of more competing pages and more links getting indexed.
* MSN mentioned that they were also looking to get more into universal search.

[coolguy27]

I also notices that using anchor text really affect SERPs especially using the internal anchor text...