Sculpting anchor text percentage through disavow?
-
Hi there, should less-than-optimal links be preserved, if those links contribute to a more attractive anchor text percentage profile?
I'm working on a client who spun a bunch of articles, using keyword word anchor text. No surprise, the strategy worked great up to the penguin update. About 90% of the client's links come from these spun articles. The other 10% of links are naturally occurring, quality links. Furthermore, these quality links are also keyword rich.
Now, it occurs to me that if I remove / disavow the links coming from the spun articles, I'm left with the 10% of quality, anchor text rich links. I'm concerned that Google will see this percentage as too high, and lower the rank.
Furthermore, I have a vague memory of watching some YouTube video, where an ex-Googler says that your brand name should be about 60% of your anchor text, and everything else lower. Finally, when I examine the anchor text in links coming into the ranking sites, they have 5-15% anchor text density on their keywords.
So, I feel a bit of a contradiction: I should clean up all of the crappy links from the spun articles, but then that risks having only the keyword rich anchor text links active? Therefore, I'm considering leaving some of the crappy links active on non-relevant keyword text, such as the good 'ol "click here" link.
Also, before answering this, I can already predict some of the answers on philosophical grounds: those crappy links from spun articles are not natural and garbage, so get rid of them. Fair enough, but I'm also interested in an answer on only the dimension of what will produce the highest rank for my client?
-
Was the hit from Penguin, or a manual penalty? If it was not a manual penalty, then in theory, you might be safe enough to keep some of those to maintain some diversity.
I would caution you though that there's no way to know what threshold exists for how many need to be cleaned up in order to address the penalty vs. how many can remain while working on obtaining higher quality links.
This is further complicated by the notion that if it was not a manual penalty, some of the losses could be to current on-site failings that were caught up in other algorithm changes before, around the same time as or immediately after Penguin.
For example, what if there were 5 problems with the on-site SEO, and the Penguin update caused a "trigger" due to link anchors? And what if it turns out that you might only need to do some link clean-up but simultaneously also do some on-site work?
There's just no way to know in advance. Especially without a full evaluation across the board.
Very interesting concept though.
And for the record, there truly is no secret percentage formula regarding brand instances in anchors. With hundreds of factors to SEO, one site could have only 20% anchors with the brand in them and still have higher trust than a competitor site that has more brand anchors but weakness in other signals.
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
-
How can I identify links that point to a specific landing page with a specific anchor text on my own website?
I am trying to identify buttons and links that point to a specific landing page on our website that have a certain word in the anchor text and I would like to know the referring page URL too. Does anybody have an idea on how to do this? We have above a hundred landing pages and I would rather not go through them one by one 😄 Thanks for the help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 10to8-Moz0 -
Disavow files and net com org etc ....
When looking at my backlinks if I see something like this: www.domainPizza.net
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HLTalk
www.domainPizza.com
sub.domainPizza.com
www.domainpizza.org
domainPizza.net
https://domainpizza.com
https://www.domainpizza.net What is the actual list of disavows that I put into the file if I want to disavow this domain? I am seeing so many variations of the same domain. Thank you.0 -
2015 Disavow Links on Bing?
In years past I was told not to disavow links in Bing unless the site had an issue. This was driven home when a site we were working on disavowed the links in google and saw the site recover after a few months, then when they disavowed the same links in Bing and the rankings dropped 20% over the next few months. The reasoning was that Bing was looking more at the qty of links, and didn't analyze links the way Google does. So even though you might disavow links in Google you might not want to disavow those same links in Bing. Does this still hold true in 2015? I want to get the community's opinion on this topic, should the same links be disavowed in Bing that are disavowed in Google? Why or why not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K-WINTER1 -
Submitted a Disavow BUT can't send in a RECONSIDERATION, WHY?
Hi Community! 2 weeks ago, i sent in our first/HUGE disavow list to Google. Out of the 2700 domains we submitted, 1300 of them we successfully removed, but we have nothing to show Google. Reason is because on our reconsideration request page, we can't submit anything because we didn't receive a message from Google (please see screenshot). I know for a FACT we got hit by an ALGORITHM penalty back in March2013. So, I have this wonderful Gdoc to prove that we worked LONG AND HARD to add and remove links in the past year, but we can't seem to message Google and tell them our story on why we should be reconsidered. How do we tell Google our success of removals? It's been 2 weeks, how much longer until we see a change in traffic? Or do we have to wait for the next update of algorithms by google aka REFRESH to see a change? Let me know and thank you so much in advance! Shawn cYGKLVR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1241 -
I want to Disavow some more links - but I'm only allowed one .txt file?
Hey guys, Wondering if you good people could help me out on this one? A few months back (June 19) I disavowed some links for a client having uploaded a .txt file with the offending domains attached. However, recently I've noticed some more dodgy-looking domains being indexed to my client's site so went about creating a new "Disavow List". When I went to upload this new list I was informed that I would be replacing the existing file. So, my question is, what do I do here? Make a new list with both old and new domains that I plan on disavowing and replace the existing one? Or; Just replace the existing .txt file with the new file because Google has recognised I've already disavowed those older links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Where's all the text?
Hi, We recently (yesterday) had a developer make a new site for us on Wix http://www.appointeddhq.com/ as the one we were planning to put up had a few teething issues (the beackend booking system wasn't ready and we needed something up immediately for a TV show we were being featured in). Having now had the chance to look through it, I'm not quite sure what's going on. None of the text appears to be there on any page, I can't find any of the descriptions we gave the developer, the alt tags behind pictures (and even the pics themselves) don't appear to be there, the URLs are messed up, titles are incorrect and there are no title tags to be found. Am I misunderstanding or is the whole site built in java? Obviously, this is quite a huge issue and I'll want to get it sorted immediately, but I thought it best to see what the good folks here though. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Best way to set up anchor text on parked pages?
Our company is no longer offering a series of products, much to the disappointment of our SEO team since we've spent a long time building up the pages and getting them ranked organically. The pages all have decent page rank and in some cases rank #1 for the primary keyword. We have a sister company that we acquired a year ago and they still offer these products on their website. They are a completely separate company with their own website which existed long before we acquired them and we have nothing to do with their website. Our team has proposed that rather than take down the URLs on our site for the products we no longer offer, to put a message saying something like "sorry we don't offer this anymore but you may be interested in this.." and then link to our sister company with anchor text so that they can get some benefit from our SEO efforts if we can't. The question/issue is how should we do that since there will be a lot of pages from the same domain, about 20 pages, all linking to a few pages on a different domain. Should the anchor text be varied unbranded or branded? On the one hand I think if we change up the anchor text used to link to another page many times from a single domain that looks strange and transparent to google. On the other hand unbranded text would be the better descriptor for users since we are deep linking to the product not the homepage of the other site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edu-SEO0 -
Am I Stuffing Internal Anchor Text?
We've got about 1,700 products and 6,600 pages on our site. I recently finished up adding similar product links and popular category links to our product and category pages in an effort to juice up the pages that sell and make us money. I also added a category html sitemap in the footer. A couple of the targeted category rankings are moving down. Am I possible accruing a penalty for overusing anchor text? Is this internal linking strategy poor form? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0