Internal Anchor Text Penalty Clarification
-
I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site.
Per Rand and other training, we added related product links and popular category links to our product and category pages. At the time, we did not have an html sitemap in the footer.
We're a small to medium sized site with 1,700+ products. We have since added an html sitemap of our categories to our footer.
Now we have category links in the sitemap and category pages and product pages with targeted anchor text.
I'm beginning to see downward movement on some of those targeted categories.
If I have an html sitemap in the footer (category index) should I get rid of the popular category links throughout the rest of the site?
Also, with more frequency, I'm seeing a "product index" and "category index" in footers. Is this a best practice?
Thanks.
-
Here's a dated thread (2009) from Rand.
And another from a daily blog a few days ago.
Rand's blog #2 is what concerns me.
Take this page for example (Alan, hold your breath this is a CMS site). The intent is to channel the juice to those pages.
Every page on our site has a similar link strategy. I've tried to link according to the product "neighborhood" or to similar/related pages. The only exception is the link to our western horse tack page. I've tried to link to the western tack page from just about every other product and category page.
The result is a sizable increase in page authority, but just recently the page rank has dropped significantly.
My understanding from other threads is that a person can "stuff" anchor text and accrue a penalty for it.
Alan, is your article suggesting an html sitemap is not necessary if I'm conducting targeted linking on product and category pages?
-
nor me.
but seeing you have added a sitemap to your footer, it may be that you have changed your internal linking stucture and the flow of link juice around your site.
Havering a sitemap on every page means your link juice is not being used to its otimum
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
-
I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site.
A penalty for internal anchor text?
I've never heard of that.
-
I literally just got off the phone with Jake over at Virante (in NC) and one thing he was mentioning was Anchor Text penalization and that it occurs on the keyword level. If/when you get dinged on the keyword level and presumably with 1700 products that could be some serious keyword cannibalization. Try just using the/a brand name URL [http://www.youdomain.com] or [http://www.afilliatesdomain.com] when utilizing Anchor Text. Google will not penalize you on a "brand level" whereas they might for being hyper-prolific with "Green Widgets" or some other generic popularized keyword (phrase).
Shameless Plug: follow me @derZukunft
Good luck and good on ya,
Cheers,
Brian
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
-
Mobile Site Panda 4.2 Penalty
We are an ecommerce company, and we outsource our mobile site to a service, and our mobile site is m.ourdomain.com. We pass the Google mobile ready test. Our product page content on the mobile site is woefully thin (typically less than 100 words), and it appears that we got hit with Panda 4.2 on the mobile site. Starting at the end of July, our mobile rankings have dropped, and our mobile traffic is now about half of what it was in July. We are working to correct the content issue but it obviously takes time. So here's my question - if our mobile site got hit with Panda 4.2, could that have a negative effect on our desktop site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Low text-HTML ratios
Are low text-HTML ratios still a negative SEO ranking factor? Today I ran SEMRUSH site audit that showed 344 out of 345 pages on our website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) show an text-HTML ratio that ranges from 8% to 22%. This is characterized as a warning on SEMRUSH. This error did not exist in April when the last SEMRUSH audit was conducted. Is it worthwhile to try to externalize code in order to improve this ratio? Or to add text (major project on a site of this size)? These pages generally have 200-400 words of text. Certain URLs, for example www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/nycofficespaceforlease more text, yet it still shows an text-HTML ratio of only 16%. We recently upgraded to the WordPress 4.2.1. Could this have bloated the code (CSS etcetera) to the detriment of the text-HTML ratio? If Google has become accustomed to more complex code, is this a ratio that I can ignore. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Link Building And Anchor Text Placement
Hi everyone, I can't seem to find a concrete answer on how anchor text is going, so I'm hoping you all can shed some light on it. We were asked to do a few guest blog posts, and I wanted to figure out what's the most effective way to use the backlinks. Granted, I know user experience is most important, but since we have control over the topic, I can tailor it so that won't be a problem. Other than user experience, how should I approach it? Things I'm considering: 1. Should I use branded text or keyword text? Kemp & Ruge Law Group vs car accident attorney? I've seen some reports of exact match anchor text causing some penalties, but I'm thinking that's for like thousands of links. We barely have any. 2. Should we point the links to our homepage to help our domain authority or to the page with the keyword phrase we want to rank higher? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Penguin Footer Links - Penalty or Devaluation?
One of customers provides IT Support for a municipality. The municipality's website (1000+ pages) has a footer link with the anchor text "IT Support" linking to our customer's site. The link is there for employees to get help. In mid summer, our customer's rankings tanked for "IT Support". It looks like a hit by Penguin. The question is, could removing the links bring the rankings back? Does Google's penguin algorithm penalize you for the footer links, or are they simply de-valued? Should we pull them down or no-follow them? If they aren't truly hurting their rankings, we would just leave them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill1 -
Links in body text
From a purely SEO /link juice perspective, is there any benefit to linking from body text to a page that is in a pervasive primary navigation? The primary nav puts a link at the top of the HTML. With the tests done by members of this site, the "first link counts" rule negates the link juice value of a link in the body text if there is already a link in the nav. Now I've also seen the data on using hash tags to get a second or third link, but ignoring that, it would seem that links in the body text to pages in the nav have zero effect. This brings me to another question - block level navigation. If anchor text links pass more juice than links in the top navigation, why would you put your most coveted target pages in the top nav? You would be better off building links in the content, which would create a poor user experience. To me, the theory that anchor text links in the body pass more juice than links in the primary nav doesn't make any sense. Can someone please explain this to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Internal Anchor Text - Partial or Exact Match Does It Matter?
When linking internally on an ecommerce site between pages and from a sitemap, is partial or exact match on the anchor text a significant factor? If it matters to Google, which is a better practice to use? I found plenty of info on external links, but precious little on internal links (which suggests it doesn't matter enough to worry about).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Penalties for site going down often?
I have a client with a site that ranks for some very competitive terms who consistently has server issues and the site goes down for a day at a time. Each time this happens his site seems to drop in site wide rankings and then stay there for months without ever fully recovering. Only part of the rankings are usually recovered. Has anyone else seen this trend? Is it something Google keeps on record without fully removing any penalty addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0
