Making anchor text look more natural
-
Hi there,
I have recently been approached by a company looking to do some SEO work for them, having had a look at their link profile, they had being using a lot of exact match anchor and have seen a drop in the rankings, no surprise there.
I was thinking of asking the website where they have placed these links and changing them, so there is a mixture of exact, phrase, brand etc, what do you think? would this be best practice? or just leave these as they are and start building fresh links?
Kind Regards
-
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the link, very good read.
I also read this:
Clearly, after Panda 3.3, Google implemented some sort of threshold for what they feel is an appropriate ratio of anchor text that any website should have. Websites with a higher ratio than this threshold saw the value of all of those links completely discounted — it was as if they didn’t exist anymore
Does this mean going back to these websites where the exact match anchor text is a changing it to lets say phrase or brand will not make any difference?
-
Hi Gary,
I am currently working on a link profile which is very heavy in exact match anchors, by going deeper into this problem i noticed that there was such are large amount present because of footer, blogroll or site-wide links with the exact match anchor.
I suggest you use Open Site Explorer advanced report tool and filter on the exact match text which you would like to focus on, once you have the CSV export you can go through the list of domains linking in on that anchor, then you could use SpyOnWeb to check how many sites share the shame IP address, should you find that site shares the same ip address as a lot of other sites it's most likely part of a link farm and it would be best to request the link be completely removed. (You could also examine it's link profile and content to check its quality).
All good domains you find linking in you could request them to change the anchor slightly to something branded or even just the URL, although i would probably just leave the quality links alone and create good content to make people link in which would be 100% natural and would balance your link profile.
Kyle
-
I would say keep them if they are good links, but you would probably want to look at changing percentages of anchor text and adding in some more "natural" terms such as brand names and generic terms.
A good guideline to a natural backlink profile can be found here:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/post-penguin-seo-link-building-the-naked-url-truth/
Been referencing this one a lot recently as I find it's a great way of explaining types of anchor text.
-
Hi William,
They are actually placed on good websites, however they have just been excessive in using exact match anchor text which has done them no favours.
Let's say I go and change 40% of these to brand, phase etc would it not be suspicious to search engines that nothing on the page itself has changed apart from the anchor text?
Kind Regards
-
Are these sites spam sites? If they are legitimate links, there is rarely a chance it will effect rankings. If you however, get these and requested these links, it would negatively effect you at the end and you might want to just remove those bad sites and keep the good ones.
If sites are all good and just happens to have same match throughout, I would just contact the site to have them change it up a bit, whether it is a 4-5 word anchor text or simply the URL(very normal).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Please have a look at my website. I am stuck here.
Here might be the reason. I had loads of unnecessary content so I given them the noindex tag. I tried to change the robot.txt file but that shouldn't be a problem in SEO. First my site had a country specific domain and then a year later I changed it to .Com, as to target globally (Mainly US). My site is ranking well in that specific country (never been close to page 1) on page 3 almost every time. It's not ranking in other countries, despite the fact that I've not targeted it to any specific country since the domain was changed. A month ago, I deleted 404 pages and all the thin content which was indexed in the SERP and also deleted the duplicated contents and as well as the copied contents. Meanwhile I've also tried changing the headings in some of the products articles as they were causing the duplicate heading issue. I've recently switched my hosting from the UK based server to the Us based server because the last hosting has bad downtime. So far until now nothing seems to be working in my favor. I'm just tired of resolving issues and in return finding a zero result. This is my devil site: 10stuffs.com plz check it out and tell me why my site is not ranking at all and what sould I do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Looking to hire an SEO Specialist: Freelance at 60-80 hours per month ongoing
I'm posting this on behalf of someone I know looking to hire an SEO guru. Sounds like a great opportunity for a freelancer looking for guaranteed monthly work. The details can be found at: [link deleted]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2wheelpartssupply0 -
Anchor phrase over optimization due to press release?
Hello. I recently opened my website last month and after that did some seo and a press release. SEO guy was good and didnt over optimize any particular keyword. but now I am seeing a partular phrase is hovering around 10%. That is rather a money keyword and I am worried am I gonna get a penalty for that. That keyword came from the press release where I am seeing 7 rather very reputable website posted that press release. Now what are the chances of getting a penalty for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | some1cool0 -
Varying Internal Link Anchor Text with Each New Page Load
I'm asking for people's opinions on varying internal anchor text. Before you jump in and say, "Oh yes, varying your anchor text is always a good idea", let me explain. I'm not talking about varying anchor text on different links scattered throughout a site. We all know that is a wise thing to do for a variety of reasons that have been covered in many places. What I'm talking about is including semi-useful links below the fold and then varying the anchor text with each page load. Each time Googlebot crawls a page, it sees different anchor text for each link. That way, Googlebot is seeing, for example, 'san diego bars', 'taverns in san diego', 'san diego clubs', and 'pubs in san diego' all pointing to a San Diego bar/tavern/club/pub page. I'm wondering if there is value in this approach. Will it help a site rank well for multiple search queries? Could it potentially be better than static anchor text as it may help Google better understand the targeted page? Is it a good way to protect a large site with a huge number of internal links from Penguin? To summarize, we're talking about the impact of varying the anchor text on a single page with each page load as opposed to varying the anchor text on different pages. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Internal anchor text
Hi, I'm not sure what approach I should be using with my internal anchor text. Ideally I would like to rank well for about 3 keyword variations, so what I am wondering is is this achievable through judicious use of onsite anchor text? What I'm trying to establish is whether I should focus on just one term throughout and never vary? Or, should I go for a variety of all 3 keywords? Should I go for a wide variety of semantically similar phrases. Where are the most important places for this anchor text?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornwall
E.g. home page, main nav, text links within articles? Should I try and use the full term in my navigation. E.g. instead of using
Pink | Blue | Green
should I go for
Pink widgets | Blue widgets | Green widgets Any suggestions, pointers to useful articles would be very much appreciated. TIA,
Chris0 -
New domain or wait - Anchor Text Penalty
Hi We are confident we have an anchor text penalty and have removed nearly all offending links about 3 months ago, and since have only engaged on 100% natural linking with good content and simply asking people to share our site. However we have made no progress all in terms on position for our main keyword - we now thinking of starting a fresh on a new domain as Google doesn't seem to be able to forgive us... Any ideas please?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
New FB page feature LOOKS AWESOME how to get it for me too??
So I was commenting on an article that my girlfriend shared and the coolest thing happened. Check out the screens for details, but basically, as soon as i finished my comment and pressed enter, a little like box prompt window popped up. This was on FB not on their site, and I thought that was awesome. Anyone heard of, or no what is required to get this for other pages??? Thanks!! Tyler Abernethy 0KyS0wQ.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
What is the meaning of anchor text penalty?
If i have 70% back links with same anchor text, will i get penalized? some of my blog's pages which were previously in top 100 in google are no where now. but for other long tail keywords, m still in same position. How to get rid of this penalty? Should i create more links with different anchor text to reduce the effect or should i remove that 70% back links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | web2smspk0