Total Exact Match Anchor Text Percentage or a Few High Quality Exact Match Backlinks, which is better?
-
Hello,
I was wondering if anyone could help me. I am trying to rank a web page for a competitive regional search term.
Upon inspecting all the competitors’ backlinks they appear to using an overly high exact match anchor text to rank on the first page for this keyword.
Somewhere in the region of 15 – 55% exact match anchor text. So the question is what does big G provide a heavier weighting for,
A.) The total percentage of exact match anchor text for all your backlinks, until it reaches the point of over optimization. A higher percentage up to about 60% will help you rank in the top 3. Meaning I should change a 1,000+ backlinks on multiple domains to the exact match anchor text.
B.) Or just a few backlinks with the exact match anchor text but from really high quality domains with a ‘Majestic SEO’ Trust and Citation Flow above 40.
Any help would be appreciated, exact match anchor text is meant not to work but it still does.
-
Hello Chris,
Thank you for replying to my question. It is a difficult one, I think as a company we will have to go with a safer long term strategy and see how it pans out. Maybe a PR stunt, instead of exact match backlinks.
Kind regards
Rob
-
Hello Malcom,
Thank you for replying to my question. In theory; I agree with this, producing high quality pages for the end user. However in reality for competitive niches, it does not matter how good your landing page is, it will not rank in a competitive niche. As all the competitors have such inflated exact match anchor text backlinks.
We will definitely look at improving our landing pages as a long term strategy.
Kind regards
Rob
-
You know Tom, it sounds like you might have excessive "exact match" links on the mind : ) and that can be a limitation to you in today's search. The sites at which you can get exact match anchor text these days may not pass the value they once were able to and Google doesn't use anchor text to establish relevance to a search query the way it once did, either.
Are there sites whose rankings are being held up by exact match links? Sure. Such legacy-style rankings exist because Google tries not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because the way "importance" on the web was demonstrated in the past (via links and anchor text) is different than the way we're able to demonstrate it today (via social/mentions) doesn't mean some of those old linked-to-with-anchor-text resources are any less important than they once were.
Think of what makes you recognize that something is "important" in your everyday environment. Is it that a number of lower quality references all say exactly the same thing about something? Not really. Things that are important tend to be the focus of a variety of semantic references and sentiments from a variety of high- and low-quality sources and it's that kind of importance, aka authority, that you're trying to replicate in your off-page efforts. Focus on getting people to discuss your product/service rather than just getting webmasters to link to it.
Granted, all the above is a bunch of longer-term strategic gibberish that you can toss out the window if your business tactics and search marketing efforts are focused on the short term. If that's the case, I'd go with "B", but good luck with that.
-
I would go with a higher amount of " exact match" keywords. As long as the content on the page that it leads to is highly relevant. Google is all about serving the best content for the search query. So be sure to make the content that the person is clicking through to extremely relevant to the topic. This now becomes a quality of content and by serving highly relevant content as opposed to working on back links google is going to go where the content is all the time. Also the time that the user spends on the site is taken into consideration.
Hope this helps.
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
-
All backlinks not showing on my website
hey folks, i am fairly new to SEO and i have noticed that i have backlinks that tools like ubersuggest or SEM rush are nothshowing my product is lazyapply.com. -> It's an automated job search application can anyone suggest me what should id do ? PS - for example i have backlink from crunchbase.com but my website is not showing me that
Link Building | | viveklazy0 -
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 -
What is a good tool for managing backlinks?
We have several that are not relevant and I need to manage the task of writing each to ask to remove.
Link Building | | Buzzfish0 -
Our anchor-text profile is natural, but looks spammy, what to do?
We are a site with about 12 directories, each one in a sub-folder and previously had their own URL which we merged together for increased branding efforts. When I was analyzing our anchor-text profile of our study abroad directory, it seems that the anchor-text profile is heavy on your key keywords, such as 'Study Abroad' and then some branded. When I say heavy, I am talking 88% are 'study abroad'; followed by 4% are branded, and 2% are branded the old URL that is 301'd to the new subfolder. We have never bought links nor have we really had a strong link building strategy. I am currently thinking of disavowing the links with low DA and are part of the heavily used (study abroad) keywords. Is this a good idea? What should we do to show that these are natural links?
Link Building | | GoAbroadKP0 -
What should be the anchor text in a footer?
For anchor text that is in a footer, should it be a keyword or the domain name www.example.com or Keyword for Example.com? We have a parent company that has other subsidiary companies and they want to have links in the footer that has domain name for link building purposes. But we want them to have keywords in the anchor text instead of the domain name?
Link Building | | cfield_splashmedia.com0 -
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 -
Backlink stupid newbie question
I know most of you will be rolling your eyes but please help. I realize how important backlinks are for page rank with Goggle. Also know it's important to get these links indexed. I've signed up with about 20 high rank sites (DMOZ,GoGuides, Gimpsey, SearchSight, etc.) to aquire high pr backlinks. If I want to submit my backlinks to an indexing service, is the url for my backlink their website, example www.searchsight.com, or the page url where I'm
Link Building | | JamesSagerser
listed<http://searchsight.com/search.htm?search=www.acabinbythepond.com>on ? Also, same question for forums: I've registered for several high pr forums and competed the registration with a BBCode signature. What is the url for that backlink if I submitted it to a indexing service? Thanks in advance.0