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.
-
If you have your sitemap.xml and have submitted it to both Google and Bing, then you should be fine.
-
Agreed on the silo groupings (neighborhoods). I've got some retooling to do. Thanks for that.
Its interesting on the sitemap deal. Some pro's recommend it always. Some don't like them at all. Now you're commonly seeing product indexes and category indexes.
I'm inclined to get rid of it (I'm just afraid my site was not set up optimally so I'm retooling there as well).
-
If adding links, try to keep the links within the same category. For example on the product page you provided, I would have links to the other 5 horse turnout blankets.
The goal with internal linking is to focus category and silo groupings. Or if you think of each page and remember that everything on that page should be related to what you want to rank for.
And to answer your overall question, I don't believe the changes you have made would hurt you. But really try to focus your links as groups.
As for sitemaps, if you have correctly designed your site, a sitemap really isn't necessary, so I would probably get rid of it.
-
Thanks Brent. Here's a product page and here is our sitemap in the footer.
-
There are so many factors that could play into this. Yes and No. I would have to take a look at an example to get you a better answer.
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
-
International SEO with 27 TLD`s
Hi Guys! Would like to have your expert opinion on the structure of a big international company. They are active over 27 regions, with all their own local TLD website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sie.SAS
Some of them are translated, but most of them are in English (big duplicated content, you know it). Next to that they have a webshop on 4 subdomains of theses 27 local TLD's. In my opinion it would be best to merge them all back to the .com domain and set-up a 301 redirect for all local TLD`s.
However what is your opinion on these 4 webshops? should I make them in the following structure : .com/region/shop (for example .com/fr/shop) Thanks for the feedback! Kind Regards S.0 -
How important is my code to text ratio on web pages?
I've been getting mixed reviews on this and I'm trying to figure out whether this is something I should be concerned with. We have a higher than recommended amount of code, relative to "content" but not by a crazy amount. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | absoauto0 -
Internal Linking from Menu or body text or both with exact match keyword?
I used to have my menu link to every page with my exact match keywords. I am a Magician and have pages for each county / town so I had a link to /magician-hampshire with the anchor text Magician Hampshire in the menu. I recently had my website updated and the developer told me this was very spammy have a menu that said Magician Hampshire, Magician Surrey, Magician Berkshire He suggested that I should now have a menu structure that says Areas Covered>Hampshire - Surrey - Berkshire etc.Google will know my website is about a magician and relate the two together. Is this correct or should I revert my menu back to anchor text of Magician (County) I am running wordpress and he said the title attribute can say Magician Hampshire but the Visible text is for the user and not Google. I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text. When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu) Questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rnperki
Should I link to every main page from the Menu with the exact anchor text?
Does google only take into account the first link to a page it discovers?
Will it associate a link to a page with just the text of the county (Berkshire) to be related to Magicians in Berkshire as that is what the page is about? A few years ago I used to have at the bottom of each page Magician Hampshire | Magician Surrey | Magician Berkshire | Magician Sussex links - and to date a a lot of other Magicians employ this same technique. I was told google would slap them for it but so far it has not and it seems to be working for them. Many Thanks Roger http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanOD0 -
How to know when do use singular vs plural in anchor text and on-page copy?
I'm building out a specific section of our site and I want to make sure I target it correctly. Is there a rule of thumb when to know how to use "car" vs "cars"? (as an example) Is there a specific way to research the right approach? thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Anchor text diversity for internal links?
Should I be worried about anchor text diversity for my internal links? It seems like I should be ok but I just wanted to double check... you know how google can be
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
Dynamically change anchor text and URLs remotely
Hey i'm looking to create a widget in javascript which i dynamically change the urls and anchor text which link the widget back to my site remotely (via php) once it spreads. I have heard peopled doing this before, but i can't seem to find a example. Does anyone know of any examples/widgets or anything which can do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Is text that is burned into the code stronger than text that is retrieved from the DB?
Hi, Do you think that texts that are written inside the file's source code get more attention / more credit from Google than texts that are brought from the DB? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0