A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on the topic of the influence over a page's title tag and the outbound links on that page.
In short, we all know that anchor text plays a role on the way the linking page ranks for that keyword phrase. So if I link to page A using the keyword Big Blue Pineapple Chair, it would help the page rank for that keyword phrase in Google.
But what if you link to that page by saying, "read more here" and the title of the linking page was Pineapple Chair, would that help?
Most SEOs would believe it would. Google and other search engines look at the context and theme of a page and then may pass that theme to the pages that page links to.
The thread asks:
I've heard some talk about the importance of the referring page title tag and how this may become more important than the anchor text. Has anyone done any test to confirm/disprove this. I think this is supposedly already live and running. Seems this place more importance on relevance, which I've been able to confirm (with respect to links).
WebmasterWorld's administrator replied:
While I haven't run a stand-alone test for this idea, I do analyze backlinks for maybe several thousand sites over a year's time. I see this principle in action over and over again - it's the context of the linking page that best sends "theme" juice to the link target, and yes,that includes the Title element of the linking page quite naturally, as well as nearby text on that page.
What do you think?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
