Ask a QuestionBacklink Anchor Text Profile
-
I'm looking to clean up my back link profile as we have a Google penalty for unnatural linking. Any pointers on what I should be looking for in terms of what makes a link bad? We have a massive percentage of links under the anchor text of "workwear" and this is the keyword we have the penalty for. Is it better to get the links removed or the anchor text changed? Thanks
-
That looks like a penalty to me.
-
Daniel sorry for your negative experience. Not all SEO company's work that way.
It is a great idea to first try to get those links removed yourself, but if you cannot, Google has recently released a disavow tool, which allows you to tell Google what links you want to disavow from your website. Here is the URL to the disavow tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
Hope this helps.
-
Hi, thanks all. We actually employed a so called reputable seo firm to improve our rankings and 12 months on and several thousand pounds lighter this is what we are left with. I've noticed that many of the sites are almost identical in terms of their design and domain name. Even some ip addresses are the same so it looks like a content farm to me. I think I'm better trying to get them removed, hopefully some key somewhere can delete our site from their db and remove all of them in one go, it's never that easy tho I suppose. Amazing that you can give people money in good faith to promote your site and secure quality links and this is what we and up with. Thanks for your input tho guys
-
Hi Daniel,
If you have a penalty for "workwear", most likely many of the links that have the anchor text "workwear" were built unnaturally. I would anaylize all of your links with this anchor text and remove the ones that are unnatural or spammy.
Google implemented this penalty to find unnatural link building tactics from bad sites, and one easy way to spot unnatural link building is if an anchor text is repeated. Google uses this measure because that is not how a quality website link to another website. Quality links do not have a standard anchor text, and the anchor text often includes the brand name.
The links that are worth keeping are the links from sites with a high domain and page authority and were not built automatically.
As a rule, the links that matter now and in the future are built by communicating with people and doing "link worthy things" not by pressing a submit button.
-
Well I guess my next question in that case is 'did you buy or source links from a link farm?!' My understanding is that it's very rare for there to be manual intervention in this fashion, and if you have received a penalty, it's probably for good reason.
Having looked through OSE there's nothing that's massively obvious (for me), but will probably be more obvious for you. Bear in mind that data in OSE could be some weeks old.
Cheers
Matt
-
The answer to if it's better to get the links removed or just change the anchor text is maybe to both. If there's an inbound link that seems spammy or doesn't really fit in well with the topic of your site (ex: your site is about cars, but a site about oranges is linking to you), then removing the link could be the better long term plan.
If it's a quality link from a credible source, you want to keep that link so look for anchor text diversity as far as the keywords used.
-
This is the latest message we have from them from webmaster tools. We never had an actual notification of a penalty but our 1st page ranking for Workwear dropped to page 20 overnight. All other rankings suffered as well:
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www../,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www../ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
-
Hi Daniel,
Have you received a notification from Google (in Webmaster tools) that they have penalised you? In theory, they should not penalise your website for receiving links from dodgy sources, just not pass on any link juice from the dodgy site.
If you think about it, why wouldn't every business just set about getting loads of dodgy links to their competitor's website? Then google will penalise their competitor and all will be good with the world, right? Wrong.
If you have not received an official notice from Google, it is very unlikely (near impossible) that you were penalised for getting spammy links.
If you're hell bent on checking backlinks, use SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer. This will tell you the domain authority of the websites you receive links from. I would cull any backlinks with extreme caution though... Domain authority may not tell you the whole story.
Good luck
Matt
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
-
How important are 'anchor' text links now
We have started building some good links but I'm just wandering how important anchor based text ones are now.
Link Building | | nick-name123
I'm not talking about spamming/going too heavy but a few here and there. What's your recent experience?0 -
If possible, please help me analyse my backlink profile
Ok i have been reading and reading on seo, and been using ahrefs tool to really understand the problem my site is having. if possible some help would be great please so some of the issues and questions. My website is ppp.net.nz and i have been using ahrefs to analyse. 1 - for both backlinks and domains, there has been a significant loss. what does this mean. are they the bad ones, temporary ones? shoudl i be glad im loosing stuff since they might be the ones i dont want? over the last few days it has been leveling out so is that a good sign? 2 - looking at achors text, the majority is for hawkes bay weddig photography. i know this is not right and i need to work on this to make more anchor text about ppp.net.nz, picture perfect photography, etc. is that right? 3- staying with anchor text, i noticed i have lots of anchor texts with terms that are not completely related to mine. this is very worrying. does that mean other people are linking to my site, or has someone hacked into my account, or someone is doing this to hurt my profile? my website is a WP site. i assume it is imperative that i remove all these bad backlinks, even though they are smaller amount. but then they do add up to quite a big chunk. 4- staying with point 3, i checked the backlinks and i do get around 6-10 a days with weird text. i assume backlinks mean links to are going to places and linking back to me? but can this also mean other people just linking to me directly? if so, can this be done via the comments in Wordpress? 5- i have asked people to do SEO for me before, and being ignorant back then, i was happy to see lots of backlinks but i understand now they would hurt me. Now for me to remove them, i know i have to contact the webmasters. But can I contact the person that I hired and get them to remove from our end, instead of from the webmasters' end? Thank you for your help. i try to read and analyse as much as i can. and im glad i found these problems. However, some sound advice would be great please as I honestly dont know how to trust SEO companies. Binh
Link Building | | btrinh0 -
Anchor Text Guidelines
Hi. Is there an approximate guide to avoid over optimizing anchor text for a particular key-phrase? i.e. is 20% of back-links using the anchor text [HR Software] OK or too much? Thanks in advance
Link Building | | davidoff5744440 -
What is keyword rich anchor text?
So, I have searched around the internet but, I still can't find the answer.What is Keyword Rich Anchor Text? Is it basically just exact matching to the page. For example if my page was www.randonmpage.com would a keyword rich anchor text be randompage? Thanks. Peter
Link Building | | PeterRota0 -
Disavow Anchor and EMD
Lets say you have an legitimate EMD for a domain that is a ecommerce site with reasonable content. The site traffic was cut in half by Penguin. You think one of the main reasons that you were hit is old SEO black hat link building with Anchor that is exact match.....The catch 22 an exact match achor is the EMD. I want to disavow some of these old black hat backlinks and obviously I will nuke the ones from the spammy sites first and see what happens. What about the backlinks that have achor of emd.com (the company name and as it so happens a valid EMD) or just EMD. If the hit is coming from every single link becuase they are all exact match becuase that is the proper legit match and not some attempt to game the system......What the heck do you do? I get the War on spammy EMDs but I hope the legit ones are not hit even more. For one thing google should just have this ironic creteria for excluding EMDs....if they are running AdWords....they are 95% spam sites.....I love the irony of that one. I am betting lots of these mange to still get listed.
Link Building | | freestone0 -
Exact match domains and overuse of exact match anchor text
If your domain name is a exact match keyword and you have a really high percentage of your links with the anchor text of that keyword, are you at high risk of getting penalized by Penguin or does Google's algorithm adjust for this. For example if your site name was AuethenticBaseballJerseys.com and people usually linked to your site at "Authentic Baseball Jerseys". Thanks!
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Diversified Link Profile?
Hello,, I was wondering what type of ratio I should follow when building links to a page on my site? Broad, Exact, Phrase, Image? Is there a percentage I should shoot for? When you build links do you generally setup an excel spread sheet and watch to see what sticks using the seomoz link too? Last question, When I am building links, should the anchor text in the content Im publishing be a keyword I am trying to rank for in a search? Typically I try to rank for only 2-3 words per page. Sorry for all the questions, any help would be appreciated! I have a competitor that is spamming to death with Press Releases quite often, and the are bouncing ahead of us with Very Low Page Authority. Thank You!!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
"gimme links" = easy to fill out profile/personal reputation links that offer a do-follow anchor text flexible link
I'm doing some SEO for small niche service sites...and aside from niche directories and some light article marketing and local search directories (yelp, etc) there really isn't a budget for content generation. I really only have a budget for profile/submission links. What are some sites where you can quite easily fill out a personal profile with an anchor text variable link that may not be THAT juicy but will stick (i.e. not a spam/fake profile type of link, but something like Linkedin). I'll start with giving away 1 www.istockphoto.com Any others that aren't obvious?
Link Building | | ilyaelbert0