Our anchor-text profile is natural, but looks spammy, what to do?

[GoAbroadKP]

We are a site with about 12 directories, each one in a sub-folder and previously had their own URL which we merged together for increased branding efforts.

When I was analyzing our anchor-text profile of our study abroad directory, it seems that the anchor-text profile is heavy on your key keywords, such as 'Study Abroad' and then some branded. When I say heavy, I am talking 88% are 'study abroad'; followed by 4% are branded, and 2% are branded the old URL that is 301'd to the new subfolder. We have never bought links nor have we really had a strong link building strategy.

I am currently thinking of disavowing the links with low DA and are part of the heavily used (study abroad) keywords. Is this a good idea? What should we do to show that these are natural links?

[GoAbroadKP]

Thanks for all the input! I was pretty sure that we shouldn't disavow this links but thought it was worth opening up to the community!

[Carson-Ward]

Firstly, a lot of sites have a majority of keyword-targeted anchor text deep inside the site. This is primarily due to the fact that most links are internal anchor text links - don't worry about those. Further, deeper links often serve a very specific purpose rather than just talking about your site or company, and are expected to be a little more targeted. If you're not telling people what anchor text to use, it's usually not worth the time to worry about those.

I'd strongly advise against disavowing links that you didn't build manually. The disavow tool is supposed to be used as a last recourse, and only if you think the links are negatively impacting your rankings.

Without seeing the site I can't say for sure, but based on your description it's almost definitely better to focus on improving content and visibility going forward.

[etruvian]

Hi Jonathan,

If you can honestly say your backlink profile is natural, then I definitely wouldn't use the disavow tool.  I would only use it if I was feeling guilty about something.  So how did it end up that 18,000 links that all say the same thing?  I'm guessing that you have one or two domains with thousands of pages pointing to you using the same anchor text?  If thats the case, then I wouldn't worry about it and focus instead on new links.

Hope that helps!

[GoAbroadKP]

Hi Michael,

Sorry about that.. here is a bit more information:

Domain Age = 15 years

Backlink Profile - about 20,000 links.

We do not have access to most of these, we have played around with an outreach campaign to get some of them switched but I am not sure we want to have our resources working towards that rather then building new links. Plus it is going to yield an extremely low yield if we attempt it.

Hope this provides a bit more information.

[MichaelYork]

Hi Jonathon,

the answer to your question depends on a few things.

• What is your domain age/backlink profile/total linking domains etc
• do you have access to update the anchor text on some
• how large is your backlink profile? 86% of 100 isn't too alarming, but 86% of 100,000 is a different ststory.

its a little difficult to give too much insight without some more context.