Let’s all take the time to stop checking our rankings, searching for new blogs in TLA and sending link request emails to envision an alternate universe, a world wide web where Google does not exist. An Internet where link anchor text does not influence ranking, because link based ranking does not exist.

Let us pretend that only on-page content and some other form of ranking algorithm, like consumer ratings, influence how users find web sites, and linking means nothing in terms of search. For a moment, let’s believe that PageRank is still a distant dream of Larry Page, who left Stanford to open a hugely successful In-N-Out Burger franchise and Matt Cutts followed up his NSA internship with a job at Booze Allen or possibly went down the road of stand up comedy.