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
-
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 -
Does over-optimised ext. link anchor text of one particular keyword affect our other search term rankings?
Hi, **Does having over-optimised anchor text only affect the rank for that one particular keyword being used as the anchor text or can it negatively affect our rank for other search terms as well? **
Link Building | | Syed_Raza0 -
Is it recomended to block a page using the robots file if it has recieved a manual Pengiun/Panda Penalty ?
The whole idea is creating a new page altogther instead of the page that is performing poorly after the pengiun/panda update.
Link Building | | Gmorgan0 -
Anchor Text Choices
Hi There, Looking for some advice on the choice of anchor texts. Is it smart to include your domain name in addition to key words? What are the pros cons of including both vs. just doing a key word? Thank you!!!
Link Building | | MaidafromCureeo0 -
Individual keyword pages or single page with backlinks and anchor text?
Hi, I was wondering which is the better strategy? People say the keyword dig is the basis for any SEO strategy, which i totally agree with, however, traditionally the strategy for these keywords has been to write fresh content based on sometimes very similar keywords / terms to attract specific keywords traffic... With google getting smarter and smarter, would you say it is safer (if you know you have a very tight and stable backlinking strategy) to backlink a page that has a number of your similar keywords present, with the relevant anchor text on the inbound sites? So in essence the site ranks for multiple keywords..? I hope this makes sense, it's a very difficult one to get out onto paper! 🙂 Many thanks in advance!
Link Building | | turnips
Turnips0 -
Exact match domains and overuse of exact match anchor text
If your domain name is a exact match keyword and you have a really high percentage of your links with the anchor text of that keyword, are you at high risk of getting penalized by Penguin or does Google's algorithm adjust for this. For example if your site name was AuethenticBaseballJerseys.com and people usually linked to your site at "Authentic Baseball Jerseys". Thanks!
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
What is white hat seo for google penguin and google panda?
Hi, This is my 1st question to some experts. I need advice on link building. Are following good and white hat seo? 1: Bookmarkings on top sites 2: Top directory submission, or directories that seomoz recommended? 3: Top article directories, yahoo voices, ezine etc.. 4: Top web 2.0, wordpress, blogger, tumblr 5: Guest posts on quality blogs. I was use to with black hat methods (by mistake) , that i was not aware, Some are pure blackhat, that i never did. some time it hard to judge which are black hat. In past google like some links, now most are devalue or got penalty. Now i want to do quality seo work and slow process. any advice will be great regarding quality seo. Thanks.
Link Building | | chsajid110 -
Site-wide/Blogroll Anchor Text Linking
I have some blogs that I own with 10,000+ indexed pages of content. I have wondered for sometime if adding anchor text links for my clients on relevant blogs would be helpful or harmful. I realize that having an anchor text link on ONE article page in context is better than 10,000 anchor text links on my blog roll or footer, but I have been reluctant to use this strategy due to the bad press site wide and blogroll links have gotten, What has been YOUR experience with this method?
Link Building | | TheGrid0