Should you ever change your anchor text ?

[New1000ad]

Hello

I have a question about anchors. I have done all my own seo over the last 3 years, with tools from various sites. I had an seo audit done about 1 month ago and was told my link profile was very natural.

They had one recommendation. To go back over my link profile and ask  some webmasters if they would change the anchor from the name of my site or my url to a more seo friendly phrase. This seemed logical. I never did a lot of anchor text just name or site or url.

Anyway, over last 4 weeks I have messaged several webmasters and asked to have anchor text changed to something along the lines of the keywords Im targeting. Tedious task to go through all the links but I changed several anchors to what was recommended. I was also out link building at same time.

These last links and I got several of them all natural links after 16 hours work days. Are all will seo friendly anchors, because as Ive gotten more experienced my links have gotten more in lines of what is "seo friendly" or at least I hoped.

I asked one webmaster to change my anchor and he warned me I would be slapped with a penguin penalty and wouldn't recommend I do this. I have already done this to several of my links. Then today the new seomoz update came up and I was down on DA and PA by 3-4 points. Do these have anything to do with one another and have I been given bad advice and can I fix it if I have ? Sorry about long post just a little confused. I don't want to step into penalty land and not know I did.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Jennifer,

Great question! Thanks for writing in.

Generally, I don't like to ask for any specific anchor text. You can see why in this WhiteBoard Friday I did here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/high-value-tactics-futureproof-link-building-whiteboard-friday

While it's nice to have a mix of SEO friendly, anchor text links, the problem (as Omar pointed out) is that it creates patterns that search engines can easily detect which heightens the risk of an over-optimization penalty or filter.

DA and PA are calculated independent of anchor text, so the drop you saw hopefully had nothing to do with your "link correcting" and was instead likely a natural fluctuation in these metrics.

I wouldn't worry too much about the links you already changed - unless you notice your rankings and traffic drop. If this happens, you may need to go back to those webmasters on your hands and knees and ask them to change it back.

Otherwise, the best strategy you can pursue is to build new links to boost and balance your profile... naturally.

[Ties.com]

You shouldn't have more than 50% of your links anchor text optimized.  By and large your top anchor text should be your brand/compnay name, website url, or brand + keyword.

I wouldn't recommend continuing to "over" optimize your anchor text because you do risk getting a penalty with that strategy.  If I were you I would use opensiteexplorer and run a link profile of the top ranking sites for your keywords and get a feel for how many anchor text optimized links they have for the targeted keyword and also look at the % of brand/company anchor links vs total links to get an idea of a good mix to help you rank.

Hope this helps!