: Roughly, how strong is a soft vote versus a hard vote for keywords? Say I'm going to link to another site using the phrase "banana split and chocolate sauce". Is my "vote" evenly split between

@Cofer257

I said in the comment that it doesn't matter. What I mean is the difference is so small it's not worth worrying about.

If you link to a page with "banana split and chocolate sauce" then the page can be returned for any of those 4 keywords. If you linked with "banana split" then a search for "chocolate sauce" would not return that page unless it has those words somewhere else. (And if those words were on the page, that would carry more weight that one in-link.)

Whether the query "banana split" would favour the longer or shorter link text is pretty much impossible to discern.

You could try testing it by linking to two pages with those two variations and see what comes on top (using banana split site:example.com). The problem here is that there would be so many other factors like surrounding text, position of links and so on.

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