The AA is a pretty reputable company in the UK and is an excellent choice if you are looking for some car insurance.
It might surprise you to see that TheAA.com doesn’t rank on the first page when you search for “car insurance” on Google, in fact they are stuck on page 3.
One of the reasons behind this is that they don’t understand the benefits of anchor text, lets look at their linking conditions:
You are not permitted to include a link from your site to our site unless you have agreed to and accepted these Terms and Conditions.The link:
- must be in one or more of the following text link formats: ‘the AA’, ‘AA’, ‘The Automobile Association’ or ‘www.theAA.com’;
- must, when used in body text, appear in the same font and font size as text in which it appears on your site; and
- may direct traffic to any page on our site.
Your Rights
You may remove the link from your site at any time. To enable us to keep our records up to date, please notify us by email at customer.services@the AA.com in the event that you remove the link from your site.
Well, I seem to have broken some of those in my link above so lets see what happens.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Watch out Patrick they’ll send round the heavies in luminous jackets wh’ll sing you a song!
It’s because they’re not a client of Tamar
American Express don’t allow hyperlinking to their site at all…
link
Oops.
Now you are in trouble.
I think you should change the font Patrick, so that you are breaking 2 rules out of the 3
Found that hard to believe, so i took a look and found plenty of links to that site with insurance keywords in it, so I don’t think that company really enforces that rule much! I think there is more to it than just that.
Anchor text has been a grey area thing when it comes to directing traffic and fromt he looks of things the AA are taking the moral highground but realise that with Search engine optimisation that anchor text does help.
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