Ranking For Non-Context-Friendly Terms Without Anchor-Text
-
We are now at a point with Google where having a link profile that has a lot of exact match anchor text for a few main keyword targets is not a good thing. So, how do we rank for terms that do not fit into the content of your site, but are still good keyword targets.
Here is an example from my situation. A good keyword target for my area and business that I am working for is "plumber riverside" or "plumber riverside ca." In a gramatical sense, these two/three words do not belong together in content, i.e they would not make a proper sentence being placed together, except with maybe a comma or period separating them. In fact, this term probably wouldn't even make a good sidebar link copy.
Without having a link profile with "plumber riverside" as my most common anchor text, how can I let Google know that I should rank for this term? Anchor text used to be the go to but now you have to really minimize the use of it for exact match terms. Without on page content, it seems pretty hard. Any thoughts?
-
I think the next stage of the game for me is learning more about co-citation and co-occurrence. Seems like that is where everything is headed. Thanks Matt!
-
Hi Tony,
It's important that you don't focus too heavily on having a link profile that is completely dominated by exact match anchor text. Realistically, one of your most used anchors should be branded text - which looks most natural (however, this isn't the case for every website). My advice would be to ensure that all of your landing pages are well optimised for the keywords and then the next stage can be including some local citations and co-occurance links.
Getting local citations from plumbing-related sites will allow the search engines to establish your site as relevant to those related keywords (it doesn't need to be exact-match). Also, if you are having some article links done then you could look at wrapping keywords around your anchor text link, for example - on my blog I try get links that are like this:
Matthew Barby is an SEO specialist based in Birmingham, UK. He enjoys ...
In the above sentence, my name would be the only hyperlink but Google/Bing/Yahoo are intellegent enough to relate the surrounding text with me so that I can start ranking for the links of Birmingham SEO Specialist (get it?). Try looking into this and it will diversify your link profile nicely
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
-
Page not Ranking I feel helpless!
Hi there 🙂 I have been working at SEO for quite some time and I am such a noob. I have even done an online course. I am at my wits end. My website is https://www.urbani.com.au. I changed to https about 1 month ago. I want to rank for "outdoor furniture perth". Recently my homepage has stopped ranking for this keyword, and a useless blog page started ranking instead (www.urbani.com.au/tag/outdoor-furniture-perth/), on page 5 of google. I got rid of that page and redirected it to my homepage. Do you know what the problem is? Why won't google rank my homepage for "outdoor furniture perth"? It is ranking for "outdoor wicker furniture perth", but for "outdoor furniture perth" it has disappeared from the face of this earth. Thank you so much, if I can get help for this it would save my business! Whitney
Link Building | | vhitnah0 -
Major Dip in Keyword Rank - Why?
Last week my ranking for "keyword A" was relatively high at 16. Since then it's dropped a staggering 31 spots. It's certainly the most important keyword we can rank for so seeing it go -31 spots is rather frightening. I have a couple of theories: We haven't included it in our blog content as anchor text but once in the past 2 or so weeks since the last crawl was done by moz on oct. 21. The lack of recent links with the anchor text of "keyword A" pointing back to the blog is causing it to lose it's rapport. I've been adding most of our blog posts to Reddit and we've been getting almost double the traffic from Reddit alone. But with that comes a much higher bounce rate (~80%). Could posting and having visitors bounce from our blog posts cause the ranking to go down? I would love to get your thoughts on this issue. Thanks,
Link Building | | smf434340 -
How can a site with no content, non SEO optimized or any value rank better?
I understand there are many more variables to rank #1, but this site is currently #1 for one of our top keywords and I really don't understand what they Competior site barely has 200 words on any given page, very few content other than images with no ALT tags, titles, No H1 tags. in other words the website is not SEO optimized. My site has content, product descriptions, images, relevant titles, and definitely more optimized than competitor. My site VS competitor Total pages: 246 (me) vs 49 (them) Page Authority: 34 vs 26 MozRank: 5.3 vs 4.5 MozTrust: 5.7 vs 5.4 Domain Authority: 22 vs 17 External Links: 65 vs 7 Internal Links 152 vs 1 Followed Links 14 vs 5 More C-Blocks 14 vs 4 Total Social Shares: 127 vs 4
Link Building | | Droidman860 -
Individual keyword pages or single page with backlinks and anchor text?
Hi, I was wondering which is the better strategy? People say the keyword dig is the basis for any SEO strategy, which i totally agree with, however, traditionally the strategy for these keywords has been to write fresh content based on sometimes very similar keywords / terms to attract specific keywords traffic... With google getting smarter and smarter, would you say it is safer (if you know you have a very tight and stable backlinking strategy) to backlink a page that has a number of your similar keywords present, with the relevant anchor text on the inbound sites? So in essence the site ranks for multiple keywords..? I hope this makes sense, it's a very difficult one to get out onto paper! 🙂 Many thanks in advance!
Link Building | | turnips
Turnips0 -
Do you stop link building once you have your desired rank?
So with all these updates hitting sites left, right and center. Now you have your desired rank on Google, do you stop link building for that project? I can see some positives in this You will not add links that will get hit by future updates. If you do get hit in future updates you have less links to remove. Obviously it an outstanding link came along from BBC or CNN you would go for that. But press releases etc would you now stop anything like that?
Link Building | | tempowebdesign0 -
Question about ranking and links
Hi, Some back ground info first: My DA/PA is 42, the competitors who show up in the search engines for the term I am after have DA/PA 55/60. I have been creating anchor text links which target the term im after through guest blogging usually blogs with DA/PA 40+, I did this consistently with a guest post every 3 days for about a month so that's around 10 guest posts. And I also did some brand name blog comments, but these were no-follow and added sig to some forums. This moved me from page 5 to page 1, position 4. I then stopped and over the last 3 weeks it slipped to position 6 then to position 8. The competition doesn't look to actively target this term looking at the data from opensite explorer there main anchor text is there brand names. Why would I be slipping through the results? Not moaning just want to understand why so I can counter it. I was thinking about going for social signals through a blog to help.
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
Link credit www vs non-www?
I have noticed that when I run the open explorer on my website that I get a different list of linking domains depending on if the back link used www or not. I always ask and specify to use the non-www but many people do not pay a lot of attention to that? I have set up 301 from www to the non-www as the non-www is my primary URL. How do i get credits for the 50+ that are pointing to the www?
Link Building | | jgmayes0 -
Does having backlinks with anchor text keyword1 negatively effect SERP position for keyword2?
I have recently been gaining a lot of backlinks which have anchortext that is not exactly related to the keywords we are targeting. I have no control over the anchotext used in these backlinks in this situation. Given that we already rank in a certain position for keyword2 based on the existing backlinks we have with keyword2 in them. Will adding another say 50 high authority backlinks with anchortext keyword1 hurt our rankings for keyword2? What i am trying to ask here, is can you dilute existing backlink keyword anchortext by gaining backlinks with different anchortext?
Link Building | | adriandg0