Anchor text after the recent Panda update
-
Hi everyone,
I just read this article: http://goo.gl/GkgUr and I can confirm this is true because one of my websites drastically lost its rank last week due to high percentage of targeted keyword within back links.
Thus, what I'm worrying about is the anchor text within back links. I'm about to launch a new web site soon that will be publishing lots of landing pages for a travel niche. What I initially thought is to optimize landing page by page, so when the current page ranks well to move on to next one and so on. I thought that, by ranking a single landing page well, will have some positive impact to the rest of landing pages.
But, after a lot of time spent on studying link building strategies, I decided to spread back links among landing pages equally. I will try to get as much as possible back links from the relevant content and high quality sites (press releases, guest posting, link exchange, social networks promotion). Please correct me on this one if you disagree.
According to the above article, the recent google panda update calculates a percentage of keywords among anchor text and it would be the best to keep those at less than 30%, including "link", "here", "domain.com" etc.
For instance, lets say that my website counts 500 landing pages and every single one targets a different low competition exact keyword. So, if I start building back links equally for each of the landing pages and I want to cover each one with a back link from a relevant content, what should I use for the anchor text? Initially I thought the keyword should be the anchor text, but after I read the article I'm not so sure any more.
I guess search engines would say something like: "Ok, there are 500 landing pages and 500 different anchor texts pointing to different pages that belongs to domain.com", perhaps this should increase TLD's authority but what will happen to the landing pages? Would search engines (primarily google) see them as a 100% single anchor text and harm the rank?
I really appreciate your help.
Thank you!
-
It's hard for me to translate that into what the real anchor text would look like, but I think that targeting "/landing-page1" with "landing page 1" every time you build a link is definitely not a good idea.
-
Hi
Thank you for the explanation. Please take a look at the attached example displaying exactly how I was thinking to structure the links. I'm talking links from guest posts and other relevant content I might have influence on. Besides that, I hope I'll get enough links from people who likes the content.
The question is, what if no one actually links back my landing pages and I'm left with all those pages linked from a single relevant page (anchored with 100% exact keyword). Is it going to harm the site and do you think my strategy is wrong? Any better advices?
Thank you!
-
So far (and this is based on very limited data), it appears that Penguin 2.0 targets many of the same tactics that Penguin 1.0 did, just on a deeper level, across more pages, and probably with a bit less forgiveness. So, I think it's safe to say that anchor text manipulation is still a factor in the new Penguin update.
I agree with Mark that it's dangerous to think in terms of pure percentages, as it's probably more complex than that, and may be dependent on a mix of factors, including the SERP "neighborhood" you're in. The problem with any aggressive manual link-building is that it's prone to looking artificial, so it's important to look for ways to both build and attract links, which naturally creates a variety of anchor text. As long as you're building by hand, it's going to be hard not to "over-optimize" (for lack of a better term).
I definitely think it's a good idea to diversify across landing pages. If you're going to build links manually, I'd just be careful not to use the same tactics on every landing page. That pattern is going to look more obvious when Google sees it across the whole site. Mix it up as much as you can, not just anchor text, but the actual link sources and types of links. It's really easy to carry one tactic too far that's ok in small quantities.
-
If you post shortened URLs in a forum a lot of people will not visit them because they are uncertain of their distination.
... just sayin'
-
So again I would look at the competition and look at ratio of their deep link to home page links. I have focused much more on using internal links to pass juice on and use of anchor text, I have found the pages I deep linked to suffered the most, the pages that had no or very few back links to seem to have done better if I have good internal links to them.
-
Thanks a lot for the advice. Any thoughts on the other question is spreading money kw back links among landing pages better or it's more useful to rank page by page?
-
Each industry / keyword is different, what works for one industry does not mean it will work for another. % of brand vrs money making kw's vrs white noise (click here, etc) will really depend on what sector you are in. My advice would be look at the link profile of the top 3 sites in your industry and match what they do then slowly improve on it.
If the top 3 ranking sites on average have say 7% White noise links, 60% branded and 33% money making kw's, then that would be what I would aim for. I have learned over the last 12 months that one brush does not fit all!
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
-
I recently had someone say a resource page is a bad idea. What do you think?
I have a resource page on my website: www.joeborders.com an admin on the google webmaster forum said I should get rid of it. That google might look at it as spammy and gaming the system. Either that or greatly expand on it and make it more complete. I haven't updated it in a while and its far from complete. What do you think? Boot it or grow it?
Link Building | | joebordersmft1 -
Ongoing problems with Panda
Hey all, I’ve been following Moz Q&A for quite a few years. As we now are fighting with some huge problems, I think it is time to write my first post. Our French website http://bit.ly/1l0efCC has been struggling with the Google’s Pinguin and Panda algos for years now. At last we were hit by Panda on May this year. Over the last weeks we made several changes, both onpage and offpage. Unfortunately none of this has shown any impact yet. I therefor would be very grateful for any help you can provide. A recommendation for a good agency with much experience in SEO on the French market would also be very helpful. Our onpage problems and what we did so far: Overoptimization: During our analysis we realized that our site is strongly overoptimized. We therefor: Altered the titles and descriptions of all seo pages to make them more unique and less stuffed with keywords Changed the urls of our landing pages Changed our internal anchor texts Content quality: Some of our landing pages contain only little unique content and the text quality is low. To improve our content quality, we Made new, fresh, longer and much better texts for a few hundred pages We set up additional landing pages for relevant keywords with unique content We moved our blog from a subdomain to a folder Irrelevant content: Our system creates many pages with irrelevant content. To reduce the irrelevant pages indexed by Google, we aggregated our customer feedback pages and set up canonicals on thousands of pages for single customer feedbacks that refer to the aggregated pages. What we did offpage: We invested weeks to analyze each and every backlink to our site and in the end we had to remove a huge amount of these links. All this doesn’t seem to be enough though. There are some other things we are working on right now, but we are running out of ideas: We want to gather all pages (that can be indexed) and compare them to the pages that have had organic traffic in the past 3 month at all, to identify more useless pages. We then will remove, deindex or revise them. We are still doing content improvements on our existing pages The structure of our rendered site is different to the source text structure. We placed the most seo relevant parts of the page on top in the source code and then moved them around on the rendered page via css. Do you think this might give a spam signal to Google? We try to improve our design. But as we need to do a bunch of A/B tests before we can relaunch our site, this will take some time. We will change our internal link structure to have less links on every page and have a stronger thematically connection between them. I’m looking forward for your tips and ideas! Regards, Sandra
Link Building | | Sandra_h1 -
More than 2K dofollow links, from one site with one anchor text?
A week ago one person of our team added a link with anchor text on a web directory website PR5, but from this one link, Google indexed more than 2K links from this website with same anchor text, and then our keyword ranked first on SERP. The problem is that this clearly look like SPAM to Google, so which way is better to remove this link, with disawow tool, or to contact the web directory site owner?Could anyone give me any advice for this?
Link Building | | cvissi0 -
Anchor text for deep links?
Hi,
Link Building | | rayvensoft
I was wondering if anybody had some advice on what to do for deep link anchor text in the post penguin world? For the homepage, I am going with almost exclusively branded text with only small variations once in a while. For the deep links I was thinking of doing a mix of branded text with some additional text such as: "My Brand Name" + Red or "My Brand Name" + Blue Does anybody know if this is the best way to go, or is there any other advice? Thanks in advance.0 -
How often is Linkscape and Open Site Explorer updated?
I ran a report on a URL that needed external links updated several weeks ago. I contacted the webmasters at each site with the outdated external link notifying them of the updated URL. I want to check how many have been updated, so I reran the report. Unfortunately, there are some that I know were updated still showing up on the report with the outdated URL. Any suggestions to get a gauge on how many have been updated?
Link Building | | ydop0 -
Is publishing press releases for SEO thorugh newswire sites as effective post panda?
Does anyone have any knowledge/thoughts on how leading newswire sites have been effected by Google's latest updates, i.e. Panda? To date this has been a method (alongside others) I have sucessfully used to build links, but the results of late have not been as good for some clients and I'm beginning to question how effective this is - so I would be very interested to hear anyone else's experiences in this area?
Link Building | | simon-1453280 -
Does it pay to change link text internally?
Most of my internal pages have their best links from within our site (of course we are trying to change that). Is it worth the effort to sculpt the link text to show varied text instead of most all showing the same link text? Or is that only important from external links?
Link Building | | joemas990 -
How to handle conflicting anchor text in left nav?
Our site provides two approaches for customers to locate the products they're looking for: Brand and Category. Where we're unsure if we're causing confusion for the search engines is when the left navigation filter link anchor text for these pages conflict with one another. For example, let's say we have a Snazzy Brand Type A widget, Blue, Squared. The nav links from a category approach could be: Widgets > Blue > Squared > Snazzy From the brand approach, we have: Snazzy > Widgets > Blue > Squared Where we have the conflict is in the instances of "Snazzy". From a category perspective, we direct customers down to the Snazzy Widgets page at /snazzy-widgets/ (as it's a filter). But from a brand perspective, we direct to the Snazzy brand page at /snazzy/. This means we have two sets of links with the anchor text of "Snazzy" that are going to two completely different pages. Repeat this across a variety of categories, and you have many instances of "Snazzy" all pointing to different Snazzy-related pages, but not to the Snazzy brand page (/snazzy/, /snazzy-widgets/, /snazzy-whatsits/, etc). So what's the best way to make sure we communicate the right information to the search engines, while still keeping the customer's browsing experience intact and enjoyable? Thanks!
Link Building | | ShawnHerrick2