What is the value of english links with foreign language anchor text for a foreign site?

[jargomang]

I have a site in Spanish that is hosted in Spain with a .es TLD.

I already have many Spanish-language links from websites in Spain, but I obviously want more and I'm finding I might need to look beyond typical Spanish sites.

In talking to some of my link builders who work on my English/American sites, they are recommending that I build links on the normal article sites, blogs and web 2.0 sites that I normally build links on but that I make all the content English and insert the anchor text in Spanish.

For example, if my site were about "weightloss", my keyword would be "perder peso" (in spanish).  They are recommending that I have articles, reviews, etc written about weightloss in English with the anchor text "perder peso" worked into the English article.  Most of the sites are English sites that are hosted in the US (article sites, web 2.0 properties, etc).

My question is what is the value of these links?  Does anybody have any experience with this?

[Vivamedia]

Hi Jason!

Alex has a good point there, spanish anchor text inside english text will just look spammy.

One thing to remember is that Google recognize synonyms and other languages as well. If you want to build links for the spanish word "perder peso" and find it very tough to make it effective, links from english sites with the english anchor text "weight loss" will help you as well (the effect might not be as good as with spanish, but it will help).

Google will understand that "perder peso" equals "weight loss". But the recommendation is to work with links for the goal language, it´s most relevant for the users and in the eyes of Google.

[Alex-Harford]

It'll just look spammy. Exact matching anchor text seems to be becoming less effective anyway, and Google is good at looking at the context links are placed in, so if a Spanish link is inserted into otherwise English text that will probably look dodgy. And if you're targeting Spanish search engines, links from other countries have less value anyway.