Anchor text distribution
-
Hey SEO Mozosphere -
Working on a link buying strategy. I know it is wise to target not only anchor text links but also branded text links to keep your anchor text distribution looking natural. However, do you think it would be too risky to ask for branded text links only from low PR sites and focus the more valuable keyword anchor text links on high PR sites?
-
I agree. In general, I would say that your branded links should always be greater than any single keyword. Sounds like you are doing it right.
-
Exactly! And as most of the high PR links you have right now are probably brand name or URL, influencing the ones you can will probably still result in a natural ratio of both types.
I just quickly checked the URL in your profile with opensiteexplorer: The Top 30 URLs are pretty much all domain or brand, so even if you could add 5 powerful optimized links, the ratio still would be ok, in my personal opinion.
-
Yes I understand it would be much harder to get the target keywords from high PR sites, but assuming that I could, i guess my question is if anyone believes that Google penalizes for unnatural Pagerank-Anchor Text distributions. In a purely organic link environment, some keyword text would most likely be found on both high PR and low PR sites, not only one or the other.
-
Hey Thomas,
I get the idea, my train of thought was the following: As you say, the WSJ or NYT or whatever high quality site usually rather links to your site with the URL or brandname, rarely with an optimized anchor. Hence, if you have the ability to influence the anchor at a high quality site, this probably won't hurt, as your more powerful links generally have more branded keywords anyhow.
So the overall ratio of URL / brand / optimized anchor for high quality sites, shouldn't be bad, if your link building efforts are reasonable.
-
I would opt for the opposite strategy. I would prefer powerful sites using branded keywords, and lower PR using targeted keywords. The Wall Street Journal is more likely going to link to Nike using the term Nike over "running shoes". Looks more natural. However, if you can score both a branded link and a "running shoes" deep link then go for it.
-
Ahh yes, link building. Thank you for your input. Obviously i will not get a definitive answer on this, but it's great to hear people weigh in on the assessed risks.
Thank You!
-
Hey Zack,
I am pretty sure, you meant "link building", right?
In this case I would assume, a mix of different keywords and/or brand terms are ideal, getting more targeted anchors from the more powerful sites should not be a problem.
Cheers,
Frank
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
-
Examination of Anchor Text Ratios for SEO
A new article on Search Engine Journal asks even though anchor Text Ratios are considered important by many SEOs for ranking in Google, are they really something to worry about?
Link Building | | akhter87610 -
Anchor Text - How many and what do with our old posts
Hello, I have a two larger established websites that achieve over 1000 unique views a day. The sites have done well but we have always had problem with SEO. The vast majority of traffic is from our social media accounts -- we rank low on the SERP - below competitive pages that have less updates and much lower traffic. When I set the sites up I misunderstood a number of key issues but with over 4500 posts and 600 pages it has takes a huge amount of time to change things. I have now realised another issue -- we did not use Anchor Text to link to provide internal links to our keywords on our site. We are now adding them. My question is two fold: How many internal links should we add? From what I read on Moz - 5 to 6 internal links should be the right number. Comments? 2) We have numerous posts ie over 4000 that go back over 4 years. Should I change them all at once or will this flag a spam issue with Google? Believe me after years of problems I do not want another set back. Suggestions and advice would be welcome. Thanks
Link Building | | Romana0 -
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?
Link Building | | tonyflorespsa0 -
Anchor Text Choices
Hi There, Looking for some advice on the choice of anchor texts. Is it smart to include your domain name in addition to key words? What are the pros cons of including both vs. just doing a key word? Thank you!!!
Link Building | | MaidafromCureeo0 -
Anchor text for deep links?
Hi,
Link Building | | rayvensoft
I was wondering if anybody had some advice on what to do for deep link anchor text in the post penguin world? For the homepage, I am going with almost exclusively branded text with only small variations once in a while. For the deep links I was thinking of doing a mix of branded text with some additional text such as: "My Brand Name" + Red or "My Brand Name" + Blue Does anybody know if this is the best way to go, or is there any other advice? Thanks in advance.0 -
How do you use anchor text post Penguin?
I have a client with several businesses within the same industry - Each of these businesses have their own websites. So, I have a few questions with this in mnd: **When using anchor text (exact keyword phrases) on his website pages, how many links are safe to use per page? And if I want to interlink between his businesses, is it better to use exact keyword phrases to link or just a straight URL link for those other businesses? **When guest blogging or using an external blog of our creation, is it best to use exact keyword phrases (and how many) or URL links? I want to make sure I am not over linking - help? thanks a lot
Link Building | | BenjaminDonley0 -
Multiple KW's , on-page and anchor text
Hello, For each page on my site, I've targeted one primary keyword and three to four secondary keywords. All of the keywords variants are tightly themed. With some on-page, I've ranked page two or three for all of the keywords and many are starting to convert based on Analytics data. Each page scores an "A" using the SEOmoz KW targeting tool for the "primary keyword only". For secondary keywords, I've only included words but not the complete keyword. For example, if the primary keyword is "blue green widgets" and the secondary keyword is "get blue green widgets", I've included the word "get" throughout the copy to target the secondary keyword. My questions are... Should I include each secondary keyword once in the copy and not just the word "get" for example? Just wondering if there is a better approach to target all of the keywords via on-page. When getting links to each page, how would you vary the anchor text to target all of the keywords, primary and secondary? Thanks!
Link Building | | ShaneO0 -
Over Optimised Anchor Text
Hi. We are new to the seomoz community so just getting the hange of it. We have run a few reports and found that we have to many links with the eaxct match anchor text. We are as a result we feel penalised and held back at no.7 or lower. There doesn't seem to be any other logical explanations why aren't higher besides that. What would the best way to deal with this over optimisation issue? Thanks
Link Building | | GardenGamer
Shannon0