This morning, my friend was griping. He had 10,000 backlinks to his online travel agency, but he ranked next to nowhere for relevant keywords.

Digging a bit, I found out the reason. Poor ole Mark’s backlinks came mostly from articles he submitted to free article directories like EzineArticles. The articles link back to his site with his name “Mark Black”. No, he didn’t use “Travel Agency” or “Online Tickets”. He used “Mark Black.” See what’s wrong here??

No wonder google won’t rank him for relevant words. Google would associate ‘mark black’ with his web site.

I told him to dump the ego and get rid of his name. Use relevant anchor text for his backlinks and he’ll get somewhere fast.

Here’s an excellent article on the topic of anchor text