Unintentional seo experiment

I used to spam forums with a link in my profile pointing to my site. One day I randomly googled my username (which was pretty unique as a keyword) and my site shows up first for my username in Google.

- the keyword (my username) is nowhere to be found on my site
- no link is pointing to my site with the keyword anchor text (not as far as I know)

So what happened here?

I thought about if for about an hour and concluded that it's probably the title tag that passes anchor text (but not as strongly as a link anchor text).

I concluded this because all forum profiles have something like "Username - forum profile" in the title of the page.

It may be obvious to experienced SEOs but I wanted to contribute my experience. I'm 99% sure that title tags pass anchor text value to links on the page (even though it's very weak).

If you have another explanation I'd be happy to hear it. Also if someone can point me to threads with SEO experiments that uncover obscure ranking metrics I'd be very grateful.

Maybe not the tag title, maybe the text AROUND the anchor text. Did you have your username in proximity to the link to your site?

No, I don't think so. The only place where you can put a link is the signature and that one link to your homepage that is usually listed with interests, location, occupation... not close to the username.

Probably the username you used for blog comment spamming.
The anchor text in comment spamming is your anchor text most times.

Nope. I didn't do blog comments with that username.

Turns out it isn't the title tag. A lot of forums have something like <username>'s homepage as the anchor text for your profile link. It appears every time you post.

Still, it would make sense for example to pass more anchor text to a link where the title of a page matches the anchor text. A link from a page titled Pink Floyd with the anchor Pink Floyd should be more valuable then a link with the same anchor but completely unrelated page title.