Over optimization of Anchor Text | Consequences, Guidelines, Precautions

[JesusD]

Hi everyone. I am really worried because of the constant penguin and panda algorithms. I hired two or three SEO agencies and they did some link building for my pages a while ago. And just this time, our rankings dropped almost sitewide some 7-8 positions. I checked our link profile in this site , and we do not seem to have spammy links. I admit that we do have some low link quality, such as directories, blog posts, etc. And it seems to have 10-15 links with overoptimized anchor text, such as keyword exact anchor text, etc.

I have a couple of questions regarding this matter?

1. - What entitles an overoptimized anchor text? I mean, i can´t control people linking to me out there, and many of them used the product or brand name. Added to the fact that my former agency used article marketing links with exact keyword.
2. - If i "overoptimized" my anchor text, what is the best solution?, I could change some anchor text by asking some people. Should i disavow, delete? What is your best bet here?
3. - What is (May 27 2013) best practice for anchor text or link referall. I know it will keep changing, but i want to engage in the right practice right now. should link with www.domain.com/keywordpage.html, or how would one look natural?
4. -I saw some recent links that are really strange to me. Could the competition be sending me some bad links in order to augment the situation. Is that something normal?,  it sounds strange to me.

Thanks for your valuable advice. I know many people are frustrated with these penalties and hits. Because there are still many sites with Mass EMDs, 3-page content, flash sites, that are ranking better than a high quality and engaging one. Any resource is more than welcome to recover from these dropped rankings.

Regards,

[sophievagts]

I too find it very helpful for all my sites.

Thanks Michael for your help,

Regards,

Sophie

[JesusD]

Great! Thank you very much for the thorough explanation.

Best Regards!

[MichaelC-15022]

Deleting is generally preferable, but often harder.   Short-term, you might disavow so that if Bing isn't penalizing you for those links, they still get counted there.  If you run into a manual penalty, Google's spam team will want to see serious effort AND results of trying to get links taken down.

Really depends on the quality of the site.  If it's a spammy site, then disavow/delete.  If it's not a terrible site, then try to change the anchor text so you retain the link.

[JesusD]

Great! Thanks for the excellent advice! I will engage on a strategy to mitigate the effects of over-optimizing anchor text.

One last question, What is the main difference between deleting links and disavowing ? Would you try to convince to website owners that link to you on changing some anchor text , or just balance them out with links with site url or and brand name?

Thanks again!

[MichaelC-15022]

First off, I'd get rid of all of the article marketing links.  Disavow those domains right away.  If you get a manual penalty, you will not get the penalty removed if there are still examples of article marketing out there.

While you cannot control how people link to you, you should expect the vast majority of people who link to you without being coerced by you to link with your domain name or your brand name.

It's hard to know precisely what % of anchor text can be keyword-targeted, especially as an updated Penguin algo came out just a few days ago, making studies older than that come under question :-).  But there's a great post here from last year that you should read, where it would appear that you'd be ok keeping your optimized anchor text links at 25% or less (which I would agree with).

But to see if you ARE suffering from a Penguin penalty for over-optimized anchor text, spend a little time in Google Analytics, drilling down into the organic search area, and look at your top 5 or 10 keywords, and see if traffic from those took a hit around one of the Penguin updates. Chartelligence is a really nice Chrome plugin that can help with this.