We just can't figure out the right anchor text to use
-
We have been trying everything we can with anchor text. We have read here that we should try naturalistic language. Our competitors who are above us in Google search results don't do any of this. They only use their names or a single term like "austin web design". Is what we are doing hurting our listings? We don't have any black hat links. Here's what we are doing now. We are going crazy trying to figure this out. We are afraid to do anything in fear it will damage our position.
Bob
| pallasart web design | 31 | 1,730 |
| website by pallasart a texas web design company in austin | 15 | 1,526 |
| website by the austin design company pallasart | 14 | 1,525 |
| created by pallasart a web design company in austin texas | 13 | 1,528 |
| created by an austin web design company pallasart | 12 | 1,499 |
| website by pallasart web design an austin web design company | 12 | 1,389 |
| website by pallasart an austin web design company | 11 | 1,463 |
| pallasart austin web design | 9 | 2,717 |
| website created by pallasart a web design company in austin texas | 9 | 1,369 |
| website by pallasart | 8 | 910 |
| austin web design | 5 | 63 |
| pallasart website design austin | -
Thank you both for helping us. We talked about what you wrote this morning and are making changes based on this advice.
-
What more can be said - nailed by EGOL
-Andy
-
website by pallasart a texas web design company in austin
I would keep it really really short. Get the name of your company in there and leave it at that. Why?
Pallasart Web Design is easy to read.
Pallasart Web Design is more memorable.
Pallasart Web Design, used on all of your designs, is a consistent branding message (I hope that is your domain name)
Pallasart Web Design is your brand name and Google doesn't like keyword-rich anchor text in my opinion.
People are going to click through based upon the quality of your work rather than where you are located (in ten years running many sites all of the people I have hired are very far from me because I hire based upon who does work that I respect).
People who click through this type of link are going to do so based upon how much they think you know about Google and I personally think that Google frowns on long keyword-rich anchors for an attribution link.
People are going to click through based upon how good you are at creating links that elicit clicks and I think that short, rather than keyword-rich is more effective at eliciting clicks.
A lot of people really dislike these types of links (search here for heated discussions about them) and they would allow Pallasart Web Design long before they would allow the long messages you provided as samples. Some will not want any attribution links.
Some people are going to check your code and see if you have nofollow on the link and will be more likely to allow the link if it is nofollowed.
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
-
What to do when half of my pages aren't being viewed?
My site is roughly 1000 pages. I've begun refreshing older content. I noticed about half of my pages have no incoming traffic. Should I look at combining some of these pages and 301 redirecting the former links to that new "bigger" page and then having my home page show that new consolidated content? They don't have good back links either. Example layout now: Home Page - Restaurants [show list of cuisines] - User clicks on Italian [show list of all Italian restaurants] - Choice 1 - Choice 2 Even though my main page is seen by about 100,000 people a month, it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in going down that path so none of the restaurants are clicked. How could I improve the user interface/experience and incorporate best Google practices? Thanks, Steve
Technical SEO | | recoil0 -
Disallowing WP 'author' page archives
Hey Mozzers. I want to block my author archive pages, but not the primary page of each author. For example, I want to keep /author/jbentz/ but get rid of /author/jbentz/page/4/. Can I do that in robots by using a * where the author name would be populated. ' So, basically... my robots file would include something like this... Disallow: /author/*/page/ Will this work for my intended goal... or will this just disallow all of my author pages?
Technical SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Can Anybody Understand This ?
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
These days I'm reading the paperwork from sergey brin and larry which is the first paper of Google.
And I dont get the Ranking part which is: "Google maintains much more information about web documents than typical search engines. Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information. Additionally, we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence. First, consider the simplest case -- a single word query. In order to rank a document with a single word query, Google looks at that document's hit list for that word. Google considers each hit to be one of several different types (title, anchor, URL, plain text large font, plain text small font, ...), each of which has its own type-weight. The type-weights make up a vector indexed by type. Google counts the number of hits of each type in the hit list. Then every count is converted into a count-weight. Count-weights increase linearly with counts at first but quickly taper off so that more than a certain count will not help. We take the dot product of the vector of count-weights with the vector of type-weights to compute an IR score for the document. Finally, the IR score is combined with PageRank to give a final rank to the document. For a multi-word search, the situation is more complicated. Now multiple hit lists must be scanned through at once so that hits occurring close together in a document are weighted higher than hits occurring far apart. The hits from the multiple hit lists are matched up so that nearby hits are matched together. For every matched set of hits, a proximity is computed. The proximity is based on how far apart the hits are in the document (or anchor) but is classified into 10 different value "bins" ranging from a phrase match to "not even close". Counts are computed not only for every type of hit but for every type and proximity. Every type and proximity pair has a type-prox-weight. The counts are converted into count-weights and we take the dot product of the count-weights and the type-prox-weights to compute an IR score. All of these numbers and matrices can all be displayed with the search results using a special debug mode. These displays have been very helpful in developing the ranking system. "0 -
When to use canonical urls
I will be the first to admit I am never really 100% sure when to use canonical urls. I have a quick question and I am not really sure if this is a situation for a canonical or not. I am looking at a my friends building website and there are issues with what pages are ranking. Basically there homepage is focusing on the building refurbishment location but for some reason in internal page is ranking for that keyword and it is not mentioned at all on that page. Would this be a time to add the homepage url and a canonical on the ranking page (using yoast plugin) to tell Google that the homepage is the preferred page? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | propertyhunter0 -
Carl errors on urls that don't normally exist
Hi, I have been having heaps (thousands) of SEOMoz crawl errors on urls that don't exist normally like: mydomain.com/RoomAvailability.aspx?DateFrom=2012-Oct-26&rcid=-1&Nights=2&Adults=1&Children=0&search=BestPrice These urls are missing siteids and other parameters and I can't see how they are gererated. Does anyone have any ideas on where MOZ is finding them ? Thanks Stephen
Technical SEO | | digmarketingguy0 -
#hashtag Anchor text within content
Hi, i have a question about anchor text within my sites content. It 'jumps' to content displayed further down the page via a side navigation at the top. These links don't take you away to any other page, instead take you further down the page to the relavent content. My question is this: I've noticed in the URL that the anchor text - #jumpnavlink is placed at the end of the pages URL like so.. www.mywebsite.com/example-page.php#jumpnavlink Is this creating a problem for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | SeoSheikh
Is it creating a new URL for viewers to use?
Is it ok to have lots of these running throughout my sites content pages? Many thanks for any light that is shed on this one! Cheers
Alex0 -
Google Has Indexed Most of My Site, why won't Bing?
We've got 600K+ pages indexed by Google and have submitted our same sitemap.xml's to Bing, but have only seen 100-200 pages get indexed by Bing. Is this fairly typical? Is there anything further we can do to increase indexation on Bing?
Technical SEO | | jamesti0 -
Issue with 'Crawl Errors' in Webmaster Tools
Have an issue with a large number of 'Not Found' webpages being listed in Webmaster Tools. In the 'Detected' column, the dates are recent (May 1st - 15th). However, looking clicking into the 'Linked From' column, all of the link sources are old, many from 2009-10. Furthermore, I have checked a large number of the source pages to double check that the links don't still exist, and they don't as I expected. Firstly, I am concerned that Google thinks there is a vast number of broken links on this site when in fact there is not. Secondly, why if the errors do not actually exist (and never actually have) do they remain listed in Webmaster Tools, which claims they were found again this month?! Thirdly, what's the best and quickest way of getting rid of these errors? Google advises that using the 'URL Removal Tool' will only remove the pages from the Google index, NOT from the crawl errors. The info is that if they keep getting 404 returns, it will automatically get removed. Well I don't know how many times they need to get that 404 in order to get rid of a URL and link that haven't existed for 18-24 months?!! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0