Regarding my previous post about off-theme links, there are two other interesting observations to make. Please read that post first, so you will understand what I am talking about here.

1) Anchor text. If you look at the links from various blogs that this guy made, you will noticed that he used certain anchor text. Usually it is “wow power leveling”. It is exactly the same keyword that at the end he ranks first for on Google. Anchor text in inbound links is VERY IMPORTANT.

2) Synonyms. This is not really some breakthrough discovery, but it’s still interesting. Search term was “wow power leveling”. Take a look at results from Google. Google bolds keywords that the user searched for. What’s interesting here is that I did not search for the keyword “world of warcraft”, yet these words were bolded by Google. This could mean only one thing. Google uses synonyms.

From the top of my head I can see two ways of using synonyms.
1) Just highlighting (bold) them in SERP.
2) Also using them in the search algorithm. This would mean that if you search for “WOW” you would also get results that never mention that particular word, but on the other hand have “world of warcraft” written on the page.

From this example it is obvious Google is highlighting the synonym, however I can’t tell whether synonyms are also used in search algorithm. Maybe I’ll do some tests and let you know about that too.