Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Total Exact Match Anchor Text Percentage or a Few High Quality Exact Match Backlinks, which is better?
-
Hello,
I was wondering if anyone could help me. I am trying to rank a web page for a competitive regional search term.
Upon inspecting all the competitors’ backlinks they appear to using an overly high exact match anchor text to rank on the first page for this keyword.
Somewhere in the region of 15 – 55% exact match anchor text. So the question is what does big G provide a heavier weighting for,
A.) The total percentage of exact match anchor text for all your backlinks, until it reaches the point of over optimization. A higher percentage up to about 60% will help you rank in the top 3. Meaning I should change a 1,000+ backlinks on multiple domains to the exact match anchor text.
B.) Or just a few backlinks with the exact match anchor text but from really high quality domains with a ‘Majestic SEO’ Trust and Citation Flow above 40.
Any help would be appreciated, exact match anchor text is meant not to work but it still does.
-
Hello Chris,
Thank you for replying to my question. It is a difficult one, I think as a company we will have to go with a safer long term strategy and see how it pans out. Maybe a PR stunt, instead of exact match backlinks.
Kind regards
Rob
-
Hello Malcom,
Thank you for replying to my question. In theory; I agree with this, producing high quality pages for the end user. However in reality for competitive niches, it does not matter how good your landing page is, it will not rank in a competitive niche. As all the competitors have such inflated exact match anchor text backlinks.
We will definitely look at improving our landing pages as a long term strategy.
Kind regards
Rob
-
You know Tom, it sounds like you might have excessive "exact match" links on the mind : ) and that can be a limitation to you in today's search. The sites at which you can get exact match anchor text these days may not pass the value they once were able to and Google doesn't use anchor text to establish relevance to a search query the way it once did, either.
Are there sites whose rankings are being held up by exact match links? Sure. Such legacy-style rankings exist because Google tries not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because the way "importance" on the web was demonstrated in the past (via links and anchor text) is different than the way we're able to demonstrate it today (via social/mentions) doesn't mean some of those old linked-to-with-anchor-text resources are any less important than they once were.
Think of what makes you recognize that something is "important" in your everyday environment. Is it that a number of lower quality references all say exactly the same thing about something? Not really. Things that are important tend to be the focus of a variety of semantic references and sentiments from a variety of high- and low-quality sources and it's that kind of importance, aka authority, that you're trying to replicate in your off-page efforts. Focus on getting people to discuss your product/service rather than just getting webmasters to link to it.
Granted, all the above is a bunch of longer-term strategic gibberish that you can toss out the window if your business tactics and search marketing efforts are focused on the short term. If that's the case, I'd go with "B", but good luck with that.
-
I would go with a higher amount of " exact match" keywords. As long as the content on the page that it leads to is highly relevant. Google is all about serving the best content for the search query. So be sure to make the content that the person is clicking through to extremely relevant to the topic. This now becomes a quality of content and by serving highly relevant content as opposed to working on back links google is going to go where the content is all the time. Also the time that the user spends on the site is taken into consideration.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Backlinking Strategy
I am particularly new to the field of SEO and Backlinking and I have recently started my own blog feel free to have a look (https://thehorseradar.com/). What I wanted to find out is how can I achieve a DA of at least 30. What should be my link-building strategy? & what steps should I take first? With an abundance of overwhelming info available online I have gotten really confused about what would work and what would not. If someone would lay out the steps needed to be taken, I would be extremely grateful! Thank You
Link Building | | haris3131 -
All backlinks not showing on my website
hey folks, i am fairly new to SEO and i have noticed that i have backlinks that tools like ubersuggest or SEM rush are nothshowing my product is lazyapply.com. -> It's an automated job search application can anyone suggest me what should id do ? PS - for example i have backlink from crunchbase.com but my website is not showing me that
Link Building | | viveklazy0 -
How much time does it takes for a backlink to get registered in Google? My basketball anime website has been live since start of this week and Google has not registered any backlink.
So my website https://www.animedhfa.com/basketball-anime/ about basketball Anime has shown no changes in DA or backlinks. It has been 5 days perhaps since it went live.
Link Building | | ahmad74750 -
Web 2.0 Backlinks
Hi Normal Web 2.0 websites like Wordpress.com, blogger.com have very High DA and PA. But when we create a subdomain, DA and PA falls to 1 as Google treats subdomain as new websites. Does it make any sense then to get backlinks from web 2.0 websites? will it help in Google rankings?
Link Building | | aliasgarbabat1234567890 -
Hidden Backlinks
Hi, I hope someone can help me with this. We have a competitor who appears to be ranking No1 for a competitive search term with a very lame site and above some authoritative sites. He has been here for some time as well. When we check out his back link profile through OSE, Majestic and Ahrefs they show as only 3 backlinks from no PR sites. However, someone pointed out that they could be using a link network that is blocking every crawler apart from Google, Yahoo and BIng. I would like to know if there is a way to confirm this. For instance I know that we can use screaming frog to mimic Googlebot, however, if there a way to reveal the real backlinks to a site like this using any tools. Thanks
Link Building | | kirstyseo0 -
How important is the originating country of backlinks?
How important is it that you gain backlinks from websites in the same country you're targeting? Scenario: You have a website targeting users in Japan. How important is it that backlinks to your website are from Japanese websites? Do you need a majority of links from Japanese websites to rank well, or will you do OK with 25% Japanese links and 75% links from other countries? According to Majestic, sites for popular Japanese brands like tsutaya.co.jp and seiyu.co.jp get more links from US sites than from Japanese sites.
Link Building | | AdamThompson0 -
Building backlinks for a newspaper site?
Anyone have tips on building links to a newspaper site? I am looking for a strategy to create links to a news site beyond building one link at a time. We have so much content that is constantly updated that it would be impossible to do this one page at a time.
Link Building | | BostonWright0