Over optimization of Anchor Text | Consequences, Guidelines, Precautions
-
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?
- - 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.
- - 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?
- - 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?
- -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,
-
I too find it very helpful for all my sites.
Thanks Michael for your help,
Regards,
Sophie
-
Great! Thank you very much for the thorough explanation.
Best Regards!
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
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
-
Anchor text or inbound link keyword limits
With google's new algorithm, websites can get punished for keyword stuffing or too many of certain back links...so my question is, is there a limit on the keyword/anchortext used for a website containing a keyword you want the website to rank with?
Link Building | | SeobyKP0 -
Consequences of shutting down a company blog
We’re an ecommerce company with a blog of 150+ posts. The blog brings in very low traffic and we were never that consistent in publishing great and frequent content. We now know our organic traffic comes from other pages that are doing great. So our question.. Should we: 1. Stop linking to the blog internally and just leave the it up as is. No harm here we guess, but these posts are not as relevant now and we feel their high bounce rate and low ranking is affecting our overall performance.
Link Building | | boxador
2. Take it down and 410 the pages. Will that many 410s eventually hurt us?
3. Take it down and 301 to home page of the company. Will permanently redirecting that many pages to our home page hurt us? Appreciate any input.0 -
Internal Linking Anchor text
Hallo everybody, I am trying to improve internal linking but I am little bit confused about internal linking title. Should I use Kenya all-inclusive accommodation, Kenya full board accommodation etc or I should be using the title without the destination name, all-inclusive accommodation, full board accommodation? My worry is if it will not be too much of Kenya in each title. Any advice what is the best practice? Thank you very much
Link Building | | Rebeca10 -
On Page Optimization to Rank For Multiply Cities
I have service that operates in western Massachusetts, and I'm targeting keywords that are "KEYWORD - CITY", i have over 20 cities, whats the best way to optimize my website for these keywords, should i create a one page and mention all the cities that we operate in? Thanks
Link Building | | vlad_mezoz0 -
Is it better to link back to the root domain, or the specific page you're optimizing for?
I'm working on a project our site - building links for iPhone Repair. For the term "iphone repair miami" - is it more ideal to link to the root domain (xxx.com) or to the subpage that is about iPhone Repair (xxx.com/iphone-repair)? I would imagine the latter - but obviously that page has less authority than the root. Thanks!
Link Building | | preemo0 -
Site-wide/Blogroll Anchor Text Linking
I have some blogs that I own with 10,000+ indexed pages of content. I have wondered for sometime if adding anchor text links for my clients on relevant blogs would be helpful or harmful. I realize that having an anchor text link on ONE article page in context is better than 10,000 anchor text links on my blog roll or footer, but I have been reluctant to use this strategy due to the bad press site wide and blogroll links have gotten, What has been YOUR experience with this method?
Link Building | | TheGrid0 -
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 -
Www.text-link-ads.com, worth the trouble?
Has anyone used http://www.text-link-ads.com for link building. It is a service I've been reading a fair deal about and I was hoping to hear everyone's opinion on it.
Link Building | | calin_daniel0