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?
-
Thanks for all the input! I was pretty sure that we shouldn't disavow this links but thought it was worth opening up to the community!
-
Firstly, a lot of sites have a majority of keyword-targeted anchor text deep inside the site. This is primarily due to the fact that most links are internal anchor text links - don't worry about those. Further, deeper links often serve a very specific purpose rather than just talking about your site or company, and are expected to be a little more targeted. If you're not telling people what anchor text to use, it's usually not worth the time to worry about those.
I'd strongly advise against disavowing links that you didn't build manually. The disavow tool is supposed to be used as a last recourse, and only if you think the links are negatively impacting your rankings.
Without seeing the site I can't say for sure, but based on your description it's almost definitely better to focus on improving content and visibility going forward.
-
Hi Jonathan,
If you can honestly say your backlink profile is natural, then I definitely wouldn't use the disavow tool. I would only use it if I was feeling guilty about something. So how did it end up that 18,000 links that all say the same thing? I'm guessing that you have one or two domains with thousands of pages pointing to you using the same anchor text? If thats the case, then I wouldn't worry about it and focus instead on new links.
Hope that helps!
-
Hi Michael,
Sorry about that.. here is a bit more information:
Domain Age = 15 years
Backlink Profile - about 20,000 links.
We do not have access to most of these, we have played around with an outreach campaign to get some of them switched but I am not sure we want to have our resources working towards that rather then building new links. Plus it is going to yield an extremely low yield if we attempt it.
Hope this provides a bit more information.
-
Hi Jonathon,
the answer to your question depends on a few things.
- What is your domain age/backlink profile/total linking domains etc
- do you have access to update the anchor text on some
- how large is your backlink profile? 86% of 100 isn't too alarming, but 86% of 100,000 is a different ststory.
its a little difficult to give too much insight without some more context.
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
-
More than 2K dofollow links, from one site with one anchor text?
A week ago one person of our team added a link with anchor text on a web directory website PR5, but from this one link, Google indexed more than 2K links from this website with same anchor text, and then our keyword ranked first on SERP. The problem is that this clearly look like SPAM to Google, so which way is better to remove this link, with disawow tool, or to contact the web directory site owner?Could anyone give me any advice for this?
Link Building | | cvissi0 -
Customer testimonials and customer profile article guidelines?
I want to help people who give testimonials by writing an article about their business including a good quality link. This will be on the site that received the testimonial, possibly linked from an our customers page. I want to make each customer profile testimonial into a separate page. I don’t want to compete with the customer who gives the testimonial for their keyword phrase but I do want to boost their page rank if possible. What would be the best formula for title tag, headline and linking keywords etc?
Link Building | | PhilipGledhill0 -
Generic Anchor Vs Branded Anchor?
Hi, I have always been very careful when building links, making sure that I use lots of variations relevant to my site in the anchor text, so keep the ratio diluted. However, in recent weeks I have stumbled on some SEO's focussing wholly around branded anchor terms for future link building, I feel that a branded focussed link profile looks more natural. I'm interested to know what the rest of Moz community think about this? Thanks
Link Building | | dt18070 -
Can personal name anchors from blog commenting be a risk?
Hello, I've created a new site early this year. In an effort to stay on Googles good side I decided not to do any link building. Everything you create yourself is pretty much frowned upon by Google, right? I have been doing a fair bit of blog commenting where that would add value. As a result my link profile shows about 50% anchors with my name in it. Can this be dangerous? Thanks!
Link Building | | andersvin0 -
Looking to outsource some of our link building...
Hi Everyone, We are a small online marketing firm in the UK and we are starting to hit a bit of a bottleneck in terms of the resources that we have that can be devoted to link building. As a result, we need to outsource the link building for some of our clients (around 10). Obviously, we only want ethical, white hat link building to take place and it really is a focus on quality rather than quantity. As you can imagine, being a fairly small firm, we also have a very limited budget! We would ideally like to work with UK link builders but would definitely look at overseas partnerships if it worked out more cost effective and the standard of the link building meets our standards. Just so that I'm not wasting anyone's time, we have a budget of around £200-300 for this (I know, its a very limited budget!). I understand that with this budget comes limitations so we would be more than willing at looking at some stripped down packages (for example, we already have in-house bloggers, so we wouldn't need that). Let me know if you are interested or if you would be able to recommend anyone to me. It would be a great help. Matt
Link Building | | MatthewBarby
Wow Internet
matt@wowinternet.net0 -
Changing backlinks anchor text
Hi, I've read a few blog post here that suggests the strength of building links using your brand as an anchor text. This supposedly gives the site authority. Currently a chunck of the back links to my homepage are on generic terms i'm trying to rank for which doesn't seem to be working very well. I was thinking of contacting the various webmasters to change the anchor text to that of the site brand name but wondering if this will signal a manipulation of links to the search engines and potentially could be flagged as paid links? Has anybody done this before and what is the danger of doing this? Thanks Duke
Link Building | | clickangel0 -
Please have a look at the SEO of our site
Hi, Could you look at nlpca(dot)com and give me feedback and hints about the on -page SEO of our site, as well as any suggestions of link building strategies to move us up to first for the head term "NLP" as well as the long tail Thank you, Bob
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Does it pay to change link text internally?
Most of my internal pages have their best links from within our site (of course we are trying to change that). Is it worth the effort to sculpt the link text to show varied text instead of most all showing the same link text? Or is that only important from external links?
Link Building | | joemas990