Anchor text... How hard should one try?
-
I'm looking at a lot of competitor's sites, and they only seem to have gone after root domain anchor text in their link-building campaigns. Since I am just launching and am essentially a one-man band (with some hired help), is it worth my while to attempt to optimize individual keywords or pages at this point, or should I just do as they have done, and try to get domain-name links wherever I can?
For that matter, should I spend more time going for the low-hanging fruit of followed blog comments, forum posts etc, or emailing influencers to try and get editorial links?
Sorry if that last one is a bit broad, and thanks very much in advance for any and all help.
-
OK. So My takeaway from this is that it's probably best (since it's so much easier) to go mostly for brand-related anchor text, other perhaps than in cases where I'm really trying to make a push on a particular page? If that's correct, then my last question is: Are brand anchor text links to a particular page thought to be weighted considerably less by Google than page title anchor text for that particular page?
-
too many people assume that Google penalizes a site for same-word anchor text as a single criteria. They don't penalize for brand related phrases as much as for non-brand keyword over-use, because it's "natural" that a site or company would be referred to by it's brand name by most people. It's much less likely that a site or company would be referred to by an over-abundance of a non-brand phrase, unless that company was so well known by that phrase or those phrases as to be unique enough that those phrases were synonymous with that brand. The overwhelming majority of sites and companies in existence do not enjoy such a luxury.
-
This seems to make a lot of sense, but then I look at the link profile with OSE of a site like Askmen - in the top 500 of the most-trafficked sites in the U.S - and over 95% of their 10,000 or so backlinks are brand name... There are very few that appear to be targeting specific keywords at all. I know one counterexample isn't much, but this was literally the first site of that size that I looked at. If Google had changed its criteria to those you suggest, could one not expect a site like this to be massively penalized?
-
To add to Banar's recommendation, I'll offer that Google has been focused more on quality of trust signals in the past year and change than ever - a big part of that is "how natural does the link profile look?" Too much emphasis on brand only, or only one or two phrases across all or even most of your anchor text is an unnatural pattern. So too is obtaining links purely or mostly from the "low hanging fruit" you describe. You need variety of anchor text, variety of pages links point to, and variety of sources links come from.
-
Hi Zachary,
DO NOT ever target one page only. If you are really very very busy, please, optimize at least couple of pages. There has to be a diversity in links as well as anchor text. Of course, you will concentrate a little more at home page and main keywords but please remember about link and anchor text diversity.
As of the low-hanging fruit - absolutely NO. It's much better to build 10 good links than 1,000 spammy links. Google is smarter than this. Trust me, Google's thousands of engineers are working every day to improve search algorithm. You don't want to take that chance and compete with them.
Good luck & see you at the top
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
-
One or multiple backlinks from business profiles?
Hi, When building diverse backlinks to a website it's often possible to place one, or several, links in the business profile on a directory or social platform such as https://www.broadjam.com/Scambler, https://coub.com/scamblermusic, https://issuu.com/scamblermusic or https://soundcloud.com/scambler. Typically I would only add one backlink to these profiles (and that would be to the home page) but I often wonder if I should take the opportunity to add several links to internal pages and blog posts. Am I missing an opportunity to add more backlinks and spread out the link juice, or could multiple backlinks within short profiles be considered spammy? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.
Link Building | | JCN-SBWD1 -
Hi. One of our competitors is ranking ahead of us on Google. Our site has a much stronger authority and much more quality links than this competitor. Would anyone have any explanations for this? Thanks
Hi Guys - I've noticed recently that one of our competitors is ranking extremely well on Google, while we seem to be fluctuating, along with other competitors, for our main keywords. Our site has a much stronger authority and much more quality links than this competitor and traffic is continuously increasing each month. Would anyone have any explanations as to why we may be seeing this? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Link Building | | barryhq0 -
Link text
Can anyone give me any advise regarding anchor text in back links on external sites. I have about 8 bloggers reviewing our products on their sites. When they link to our site, they either use the words of our company name or something like “click here” as the words in the link. There are a few key words that we are wanting to improve for so should those words be made as the live link on their site?
Link Building | | Hardley1110 -
Anchor Text Distribution and Link Profile Best Practices
Hi, Since Penguin is about regulating link building, here are my questions: How many percent of a site's overall links should be branded terms? How many percent of a site's overall links should be related to the site? How many percent of a site's overall links should have nofollow? Any recommendation on anchor text distribution? Lastly In your opinion, which e-commerce site you think has the best link profile? Thanks!
Link Building | | WizardOfMoz0 -
Content toggle, tabs ad accordion for seo text
Hello there, I have two questions. 1. I want to ad seo text in content toggles, tabs and accordions. does Google robots view as seo text , eg, H1 text as it would be written direct on the page? 2. About Pinguin and link building. I am seeing up an onlineprintshop, where any industry can become a client. Lets say a medical company will be our client for prints. If they link back to our onlineprint page does Goole evaluates the link as a link from a related industry. Thanks for your kind answer. Kind Regards Mike 8bMCt
Link Building | | niceguyseo0 -
Anchor text internal links
Hello, I read about a practice (also suggested by EasyWP SEO plugin) whereby I should place on my current page (call it page A) an internal link to another page (call it page B) using as anchor text the keywords I want page A to rank for. I dont really understand this and it is a cause of great confusion in my head... Can someone explain this to me and why this would be good practice? I would have thought that having as anchor text to page B a keyword I want page A to rank well for would steal juice from page A and give it to page B? Or am I missing something else? Thanks !
Link Building | | dpaq20110 -
One website with different niches/keywords.
Hello Mozzers! I am currently building a website, which basically contains information from different niches. Let's make it clear: My website is something like eHow. The idea is to write quality articles, written especially to give the searcher the right information, without any scam, product advertisement or etc. The incomes are from AdSense. Actually I got inspired for this website from the Google Panda update. So... my question is - would it be harder to rank with such a website(domain name) that contains different niches and keyword phrases? Lets change a lil bit the situation and show you an example - I am trying to rank with keyword "how to make nice cheezeburgers" with http://theanswer.org/how-to-make-nice-cheezeburgers/ . At the same time I am also trying to rank with "The best movies of all times" with http://theanswer.org/the-best-movies-of-all-times/ . Thank you, Ralchev 🙂
Link Building | | Ralchev0 -
How to get a plain text instead of csv output for backlink analyzer?
The link analyzer looks really great, I'm using it now to do some reverse engineering and it is seemingly able to give me far more than just the 1k limit we can get from yahoo site. But it spits out the results to a csv file which just has everything bunched up into a bunch of gibberish. Is there a way to get a plain text file so its readable/usable? Or how to convert or view the csv file properly? Thanks
Link Building | | googlealchemist0