Changing broken links and Anchor text be a problem?

[mtthompsons]

Hi,

Changing broken links and Anchor text be a problem?

We have 80K pages which has about 40K links which has been created in the last few years and from last month we have been working on updating content on those pages that's old and links that are broken and changing the anchor text in those posts.

Anchor text like Click me, Here,Download, link, etc is changed to meaningful words.

its a total close to 10K link replacements and 10K anchor text. While doing this from last month have seen a slight decrease in daily traffic. is this something Google would consider as some kind of a wrong webmaster activity? or its just fine?

Thanks

[Modi]

It all depends on proportion of anchor text links. Best way is to use multiple keywords and anchors as click here / visit / product name

Having too much change - if tilted towards particular keyword - may make Google see it as spam - through an over-optimization effort.

Best to view it is through this video

http://moz.com/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi,

When we make sizeable changes to the websites, there could be some fluctuations in the traffic levels and if we don't do anything wrong, the traffic should be back to normal if not increased in couple of weeks. As you have been changing the anchor text, please be careful not to have high percentage of same anchor text. Make sure you have anchor text diversity even when dealing with internal links. 100 internal links with same anchor text pointing to a page can be frowned upon by the search engines. You can have contextual linking structure with diversified anchors texts that look natural. It is good to have a small percentage of links with generic anchors like, 'click here', 'download now' etc. Just my two cents. Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.