One of the most basic ways search engine relate keywords to content is through link text. For example, if a bunch of people were to make a link like “Silly Hat Express“, there’s a good chance you will find my site on the search results page for “Silly Hat Express.”
This is but one of the reasons it is not recommended to use “click here” as the text for a link. Another good reason is that “click here” is never (unless you’re linking to this article) a good descriptor for what that link points to. It’s more of a command, really. Also, some people don’t use the mouse at all. What are they to do? It doesn’t say “activate this link”, it says “click here”.
So, I was talking about this with somebody at work and I decided it was a good time to hop on Google and find out who the greatest offenders are. It’s actually very difficult to say. The top results will get you to places like Adobe.com, Apple.com, Netscape.com, and Microsoft.com to name a few. The really funny part is, none of those result pages actually have the text “click here” anyway on the site.
Upon further analysis, I realized that the reason for that is exactly what I’ve described above. The websites at the top of the results are all product download pages for some very popular products. Adobe makes Acrobat reader. Apple makes Quicktime. I’ll bet there are a shit-ton of websites out there that say “click here to download Adobe Acrobat” or “click here to download Windows Media Player”, etc.
I would say this is sort of a special case search string. For the most part, using link text for associating keywords is a fantastic idea. Although, being that this is a well known method that search engines use, it is very commonly exploited (see: link spam).
I’ve decided to do a little searching for common UI phrases to see what comes up. Here are some interesting results:
Anybody else got any good ones?