Varying Internal Link Anchor Text with Each New Page Load
-
I'm asking for people's opinions on varying internal anchor text. Before you jump in and say, "Oh yes, varying your anchor text is always a good idea", let me explain.
I'm not talking about varying anchor text on different links scattered throughout a site. We all know that is a wise thing to do for a variety of reasons that have been covered in many places. What I'm talking about is including semi-useful links below the fold and then varying the anchor text with each page load. Each time Googlebot crawls a page, it sees different anchor text for each link. That way, Googlebot is seeing, for example, 'san diego bars', 'taverns in san diego', 'san diego clubs', and 'pubs in san diego' all pointing to a San Diego bar/tavern/club/pub page.
I'm wondering if there is value in this approach. Will it help a site rank well for multiple search queries? Could it potentially be better than static anchor text as it may help Google better understand the targeted page? Is it a good way to protect a large site with a huge number of internal links from Penguin?
To summarize, we're talking about the impact of varying the anchor text on a single page with each page load as opposed to varying the anchor text on different pages.
Thoughts?
-
Thanks for everyone's input!
Without pointing any fingers, let's just say this is happening in the wild right now. It came as a bit of a surprise to me as I wouldn't expect Google to be fooled into ranking a site better for multiple keywords based on dynamic internal anchor text. To be clear, I have no evidence this technique is helping or that the motivation is to game Google for better rankings, but I haven't come up with any other reason.
If it is working, I must admit, it's pretty clever...
-
I would say test it out and see what happens. I would love to know the result. ( youmoz post perhaps ? )
what I assume would happen :
The new link only counts when G-bot crawls the page ( and obviously not on each page load ), and each time Gbot crawls the page it will see that an old link is dropped and a new one is added. So what ever value you gain from the new link , you will lose from the old one which is no longer there. So I really don't see the value to be had from an SEO point of view . But repeat visitors to you page may click through to those pages. ( Again testing it will give you solid proof )
-
What comes to me is this: I don't think you'll get the value out of links with dynamic anchor text that you would get with anchor text that is static. A page's overall value and the value it passes on to other page via links is iterative--it's not assigned after just a single pass of the bot. The dynamism would devalue the links, if not render them worthless all together.
And even if you had one thousand variations of anchor texts for each link and they did pass some sort of value, what do you think that footprint would look like after a year or two of google crawls? Upon a manual review, someone there would say, "Huh, look at this, their links change all the time and each one is focused around a specific money term--I think it's obvious that they're trying to manipulate their rankings. Smack--here's a penalty for you."
-
Oh yes, varying your...oh wait sorry you didn't want that haha.
Erm this is an interesting idea - on first read my first thought was you're trying to game the system and that's never a good idea.
Then I thought a little more and I suppose it is very similar to dynamic content such as offers on your linking page, although it always points at one location.
I suppose it is only similar to changing your anchor text manually to see what works best, but I think that such frequent changes could end up getting noticed - a link anchor changing every time Google visits - surely Google is clever enough to notice this pattern and doesn't it smack of over-optimisation?
I bet others have already tried this - have you done any digging to see if you can find out what the impact was?
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
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
Pages with excessive number of links
Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions. The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178" The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external). However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content. Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu. So my questions are: 1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster? Thank you.0 -
Is irrelevant backlinks real? And does anchor text affect all keywords?
I ask because I see many of my competitors with irrelevant backlinks still ranking at the top, despite what SEO say about it. I have a Web Design business, most of my competitors have their backlinks from sites they built ie "website by _____" and thats how they rank at the top. Should I keep getting backlinks from my clients (with permission)? Also does anchor text on backlinks affect all keywords in your website? Example is if you provide multi services ie plastering and decorating. You have 100 links pointing to your site with anchor text of "plastering". Technically your site still has 100 backlinks, will that also help boost the onsite optimisation for the keyword "decorating"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marvellous0 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Why Does Ebay Allow Internal Search Result Pages to be Indexed?
Click this Google query: https://www.google.com/search?q=les+paul+studio Notice how Google has a rich snippet for Ebay saying that it has 229 results for Ebay's internal search result page: http://screencast.com/t/SLpopIvhl69z Notice how Sam Ash's internal search result page also ranks on page 1 of Google. I've always followed the best practice of setting internal search result pages to "noindex." Previously, our company's many Magento eCommerce stores had the internal search result pages set to be "index," and Google indexed over 20,000 internal search result URLs for every single site. I advised that we change these to "noindex," and impressions from Search Queries (reported in Google Webmaster Tools) shot up on 7/24 with the Panda update on that date. Traffic didn't necessarily shoot up...but it appeared that Google liked that we got rid of all this thin/duplicate content and ranked us more (deeper than page 1, however). Even Dr. Pete advises no-indexing internal search results here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world So, why is Google rewarding Ebay and Sam Ash with page 1 rankings for their internal search result pages? Is it their domain authority that lets them get away with it? Could it be that noindexing internal search result pages is NOT best practice? Is the game different for eCommerce sites? Very curious what my fellow professionals think. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak
Dan0 -
What causes internal pages to have a page rank of 0 if the home page is PR 5?
The home page PageRank is 5 but every single internal page is PR 0. Things I know I need to address each page has 300 links (Menu problem). Each article has 2-3 duplicates caused from the CMS working on this now. Has anyone else had this problem before? What things should I look out for to fix this issue. All internal linking is follow there is no page rank sculpting happening on the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBrent0 -
How to retain link juice moving to new site, cms and servers?
We have been hosting our website with a provider (their design and CMS) and we are now moving to a new design, better content focussing on keywords in a different CMS platform on different servers but want to retain the link juice from the old site. We have used Open Site Explorer Report to determine all the links to the old site and the pages they link to. What is the best strategy to keep the link juice flowing to the new site? Example This site <http: www.dogslifedownunder.com="" what-is-worse-then-going-to-the-v-e-t="">links to this page <http: 19105="" www.sydneyanimalhospitals.com.au="" ourstaff="" thevets="" tabid="" default.aspx="">on the old site.</http:></http:> We will have a similar page on the new site with the same staff members called for example: How do we ensure that the we retain the link juice? Any thoughts most welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590