What are best practices for anchor text diversification in a post-penguin world?
-
There is growing concern for this topic as the best white-hat tactics generally allow you to choose your own anchor text (eg. guest posting and infographics)
-
Look at the percentages on sites ranking well in your niche. Also look at some big brands like Gnc and note the natural breakdown of their anchors between keyword anchors, brand anchors, urls anchors, brand + keyword anchors, click here anchors, etc.
It's not an exact science but should help you get a better grasp of what Google is looking for with a
"natural" backlink profile. Good luck! -
I find generateanchors.com very useful to generate a huge list of natural anchor texts. It mixes everything pretty well.
-
The only actual link building I do is to focused on building trust and authority for the domain as a whole with the vast majority of 'acquired' links going to the homepage and main categories using anchor text like domain.com, domain, www.domain.com, domain.com - category, http://www.domain.com, http://www.domain.com/category etc, etc, etc.
So besides internal linking, I don't worry about anchor text on incoming links. In time, internal pages begin attracting links on their own ...as it should be.
-
Most people like to use a blend of linking to your pages that include your brand name plus keyword, a certain percentage of just your brand, and then the smallest amount using the anchor text you want to get ranked for.
Also be sure to so the same on the social networks too.
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
-
Beta Site Removal best practices
Hi everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
We are doing a CMS migration and site redesign with some structural changes. Our temporarily Beta site (one of the staging environments and the only one that is not behind firewall) started appearing in search. Site got indexed before we added robots.txt due to dev error (at that time all pages were index,follow due to nature of beta site, it is a final stage that mirrors live site) As an remedy, we implemented robots.txt for beta version as : User-Agent: *
Disallow: / Removed beta form search for 90 days. Also, changed all pages to no index/no follow . Those blockers will be changed once code for beta get pushed into production. However, We already have all links redirected (301) from old site to new one. this will go in effect once migration starts (we will go live with completely redesigned site that is now in beta, in few days). After that, beta will be deleted completely and become 404 or 410. So the question is, should we delete beta site and simple make 404/410 without any redirects (site as is existed for only few days ). What is best thing to do, we don't want to hurt our SEO equity. Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you!0 -
Best SEO Practices for Displaying FAQs throughout site?
I've got an FAQ plugin (Ultimate FAQ) for a Wordpress site with tons of content (like 30 questions each with a page full, multi-paragraphs, of answers with good info -- stuff Google LOVES.) Right now, I have a main FAQ page that has 3 categories and about 10 questions under each category and each question is collapsed by default. You click an arrow to expand it to reveal the answer.I then have a single category's questions also displayed at the bottom of an appropriate related page. So the questions appear in two places on the site, always collapsed by default.Each question has a permalink that links to an individual page with only that question and answer.I know Google discounts (doesn't ignore) content that is hidden by default and requires a click (via js function) to reveal it.So what I'm wondering is if the way I have it setup is optimal for SEO? How is Google going to handle the questions being in essentially three places: it's own standalone page, in a list on a category page, and in a list on a page showing all questions for all categories. Should I make the questions not collapsed by default (which will make the master FAQ page SUPER long!)Does Google not mind the duplicate content within the site?What's the best strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoJaz0 -
How to Implement AMP for Single Blog Post?
Hello Moz Team, I would like to implement AMP for my single blog post not on whole blog. Is it possible? if Yes then How? Note - I am already using GTM for my website abcd.com but I would like to use for my blog post only and my blog is like - abcd.com/blog..............let me clarify Blog Post means - abcd.com/blog/my-favorite-dress Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johny123450 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How long before your rankings improved after Penguin?
Those of you that have algorithmic penalties, how long after making changes did you actually see an improvement, or have you ever? I have several sites that tanked after Penguin 2.1 and after doing Link Removal, Diasvaow files and building newer more quality links and adding content, I am STILL not seeing any change in rankings after several months. I have heard from some people it can take up to 6-months for google to even crawl a disavow file. I have also heard no matter what you do it won't matter until Google does another update. I feel like we have made a lot of changes in the right direction, but I don't want to go overboard if nothing is going to matter until another Google Update is done. What are your experiences?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text attract Penguin’s wrath?
I'm working on a site for a serviced apartment site http://www.alcove.co.in/ which offers apartments in 9 cities in India. Site was ranking in 1st page of Google for “serviced apartment + city” for 7 cities until sometime in Jan 2013. However organic traffic has been gradually falling since sometime in September 2012 (40% fall this month over same period last year). There’s been no sudden fall in traffic which we may link with any Penguin update. There have been no warning messages in Google WMT. Even today the site ranks in 1st page for 3 cities; however ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’ which was the biggest revenue earner, is not ranked in first 5 pages. My questions are whether will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text will attract Penguin’s wrath, does Google makes allowance for case when company's name includes keywords. In our case, company name is Alcove Service apartments, could there be some other reason for fall in ranking/traffic? The distribution of anchors (external links, multiple links from same domain are counted) is : percent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anand53
Keywords 34%
brand+keywords 43%
Natural 4%
only brand 11%
URL 7% For the above, Brand = ‘Alcove Service apartments’ or ‘Alcove Serviced apartments’ brand+keywords = various combinations of ‘alcove’ + [‘guest houses’ or ‘hotels’ or ‘accommodation’] + city1 + city2… Intriguingly, Open Site Explorer analysis of domain metrics (Domain Authority, Followed Linking Root Domains, etc) ranks Alcove higher than all but one site appearing in 1st page of Google for ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’. Most of alcove’s links are from article directories (no spun articles were used), directories and link exchanges with relevant sites. Any suggestions and guidance on what we could do to remedy the situation would be greatly appreciated! Thanks0 -
Mobile Sitemap Best Practices w/ Responsive Design
I'm looking for insight into mobile sitemap best practices when building sites with responsive design. If a mobile site has the same urls as the desktop site the mobile sitemap would be very similar to the regular sitemap. Is a mobile sitemap necessary for sites that utilize responsive design? If so, is there a way to have a mobile sitemap that simply references the regular sitemap or is a new sitemap that has all urls tagged with the "" tag with each url required?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamDorfman0 -
Randomly Displayed Text: Hidden text issue?
I want to add some script to my site so that a given page publishes a different paragraph of text every time the page loads. Something like randomly displayed testimonials (but with more text). So, when you look at the page source, you would see all the text (e.g testimonial-1, testimonial-2, etc.), but the user would only see one paragraph randomly. Would this be considered hidden text (one code for search engine, one for use)? Is there a safe number of words you can do this with without setting off red flags? I appreciate the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0