Anchor text analysis
-
Hello!
I'm doing a systematic review of my site after getting a bit of a heavy punishment from google last month. I think things are going in the right direction, but wanted some advice on anchor text. Here is a link to the top 200 terms as exported from WMT;
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkGVm349qCtIdHYzR01EVDhBOHFIekJZS0FVbG9RN1E#gid=0
Can someone give me some advice on whether anything looks suspicious or not? or is it not that simple? My site is madegood.org.
Thanks so much in advance. I've had some fantastic help on here already, but really any advice is appreciated.
Cheers
-
Thanks for all your advice!
-
Well, it could just be that lots of organic search traffic was finding you through blog posts and resource content and then leaving the site right away. That's normal and OK - it can mean that they found what they wanted and then left. I wouldn't worry about that as a ranking factor - I doubt that it's going to cause any significant change in rankings in your niche.
-
Thanks Kane,
I did as you said and the one strange thing that sticks out is that engagement seems to be up by a significant amount- both page views and time spent on site. Everything else is down though, every referral source. Perhaps it could have been an engagement issue, as in, people were not spending long enough on my site?
-
The thing that looks odd to me is that 'disclaimer' is number 4- what's going on there!? Surely that's an internal link that's somehow being read as an external one?
-
Thanks, that's made it crystal clear!
Not sure why the hidden navigation is there but I'm sure I can get to the bottom of it.
Did you use a tool to flag these hidden elements up, or did you just look at the page source?
Thanks again, I'm very grateful you took the time to look at this
-
That looks like pretty good anchor text overall. I'm looking at your links in Open Site Explorer and they also look fine to me. Tons of branded anchor text is showing, which is good, and plenty of random anchor text as well. I really doubt that this has anything to do with a link-based penalty. I'd sooner expect some sort of on-site issues or change in competition.
Regarding this part: "after getting a bit of a heavy punishment from google last month" - I would open up Google Analytics and open up the date selector and select the day that traffic dropped off until now (eg March 18th through today). Then check the box that says "Compare to previous period".
Now, surf over to "Traffic Sources" in the left sidebar of Google Analytics and start looking for things that have dropped off significantly. Drop in landing pages? Organic Traffic? This will be a good indicator of why your traffic has dropped if you don't already know for sure.
-
If you look at the code for the page /bikes/how-to/check-a-rear-hub/, you'll see that there are two links that appear to be part of a pagination element
Chain Wear ». But no part of that actually shows on the page itself (user-facing).
As far as the link-to-content ratio, site is a little light on text, but heavy on links. Just completing the site by putting text in each of the "contents", "tools" and "parts" sections will help with that. I'm sure that's your plan, but since it's not done currently and you're having issues, it's worth pointing out.
Google doesn't like things like hidden text/links or too little text with too many links so these issues could be throwing up a red flag in Google's eyes.
-
Something that does stand out in that list is the relatively small amount of brand terms. One would think that a site like this would more links to the home page with branded terms than it looks like you've got. In that respect, I might say your links don't look as natural as they should.
-
Hi there BlastAM,
These are the Anchor Links from from webmaster tools, which I'm fairly sure are external(?).
i'm not sure i quite follow what you mean when you say I have 'some links in the code that aren't on the page'.
could you also explain what you mean by that last comment too. Sorry if I'm asking a stupid question!
i'm rebuilding the site from scratch at the mo', so all your technical suggestions are very useful.
Thanks so much!
-
I don't see anything in the anchor text that stands out as immediately problematic. Are these internal or external links?
It's hard to give more advice without more information, but one thing I see on your site is that you have some links in the code that aren't on the page. You should figure out how much of that is happening and why. Depending on the answer you find, it may be something to address.
Plus the link to content ratio is off a bit. You may want to add more content and group your inner links to lower the count.
-
Thanks Chris.
Is that a general concensus?
-
I think those look about as natural as they come.
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
-
Is Tag Manager a good option to insert text in websites?
Is Tag Manager a good option to insert text in websites? When a website doesn't have an administration panel adding text is a very big problem.
Technical SEO | | propertyshark0 -
Is using JavaScript injected text in line with best practice on making blocks of text non-crawlable?
I have an ecommerce website that has common text on all the product pages, e.g. delivery and returns information. Is it ok to use non-crawlable JavaScript injected text as a method to make this content invisible to search engines? Or is this method frowned upon by Google? By way of background info - I'm concerned about duplicate/thin content, so want to tackle this by reducing this 'common text' as well as boosting unique content on these pages. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Coraltoes770 -
Internal Link Analysis Tool
I want to get a better handle on what internal link text (and co-occurance if possible) my site currently has. We have a lot of old blog articles that provide link juice back to the main site, but with thousands of pages, we never kept track of when we internally link to a page. Are there any tools that will provide an analysis of this? OpenSiteExplorer seems like a very tedious way to do it and it didn't appear to be 100% accurate. Also, are there any tools that will provide analysis and recommendations based on keywords targeted?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Too many links? Do links to named anchors count (ie page#nameanchor)?
Hi, I have an internal search results page that contains approx 200 links in total. This links to approx 50 pages. Each result listing contains a link to the page in the format /page.html and also has 3 more links (for each listing) to named anchors within the page. eg /page.html#section1, /page.html#section2, /page.html#section3 etc. Should i remove the named anchors to keep my links per page under the Seomoz suggested max of 100? Will it impact crawl-ability or link juice being passed? Thanks in advance for your response.
Technical SEO | | blackrails0 -
With regard to tabbed content or accordions for text... would it be better to break these out into individual pages for SEO?
We often get asked by clients if they have a lot of content about a particular subject: would it be better to break that information out into smaller chunks as separate pages, OR would it be good to build a tabbed content container or accordion feature on one single page? Does anyone have any opinion on this in regards to SEO?
Technical SEO | | chansen0 -
Block url with dynamic text in
I've just ran a report and I have a lot of duplicate page titles, most of which seem to be the review page, I use Magento and my normal url would be something like blah-blahtext.html but the review url is something like blah-blahtext/reviews/category/categoryname So I want to block the /reviews url bit as no one ever leaves reviews and it's not something I will be using in the future. Also I have a dynamic navigation which creates urls that look like product-name.html?size=2&colour=14 these are also creating duplicate urls, anyway to fix this? While I'm asking, anyone any tips for Magento?
Technical SEO | | Beermonster0 -
Minimum text per product page
I have an ecommerce site with thousands of product pages. I am using the product details provided by the manufacturer (as with most other sites selling the same products). I have 3 questions: If I want to set my pages apart with product descriptions, what it s the minimum amount of text I can add to make them unique? The content will be from an offshore company, so it will likely not be of the best quality. Can Google determine the quality of text and evaluate it differently? I have also added product reviews to the site. Are there any other methods to make the product pages more unique or SEO friendly?
Technical SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Alt and Title Attributes in Anchor Tags
Does it hurt to use alt and title attributes inside an anchor tag? Example: view my website article
Technical SEO | | donationtown0