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
-
What does google think about legit link exchanges where one is follow and one is no follow?
Hi Experts! Here is my Question for you. I am doing a link exchange in a legit way to increase sales for my site and my associate's site. My associate just wants a sales increase and no link juice. He has a very low DA so I want to give him a no follow link. Is it suspicious of fishy that I give a no follow link and receive a followed link in return? Please let me know how to proceed, I don't want to take any changes. Can you tell me the best way to proceed with this link exchange? Thanks
Link Building | | Ruchy0 -
Page Authority or Domain Auothority? Which one is more importan when having an external link pointing to your page?
Im about to make a deal with another site. We are going to exchange some links from some blog posts. In order to make a fair deal, I assessed some metrics for our posts. Basically, this site have better Domain Authority than my site (30 vs 25), but the page authority of their blog post in which they want to insert their links pointing to my site is 1 for each of them. On the other hand, the page authority of my blog posts they are interested in is 13. My dilema is about being resonable to set a good deal for both of us. So, my question is, which one matters the most when it comes to external links? page authority or domain authority? My intuition is that I’m in a better position than my counterpart. Thanks.
Link Building | | Autofact0 -
Should you "rel=nofollow" picture links if you also have anchor text going to same page?
On our pages we are having icons that link to different pages. In order to make it more user friendly we are also having some anchor text that also link to the same page as the icon. Is it bad to have two links pointing at the same page. We have multiple icons on the homepage and don't want to pass double of the link power! Thanks!!
Link Building | | Restore0 -
Internal linking anchor text with automated ASP.NET link building
Hi Everyone I really need some help here, the problem I have must be one that many have. I have a simple e-commerce style website so 1 product page can in fact get 40-50 internal links to it. These links come from a mixture of: 1. The parent category pages that the product sits on (Rugged PDA) and in turn the 10 filter pages of this category page (Rugged PDA, ordered by battery size). 2. Alternative product list on other product pages, So many products link to each other as alternatives. From Google analytics we can see that visitors like to browse product to product seeing 5 alternatives on each page with titles like "Smaller", "more rugged" etc. 3. Manufactuer pages, so we have a link to each product from each manufacturer home page where we talk lots about each manufacture we resell. We also have links from images used in the website. So its a nice usable website but we're finding that Google is still telling us in Webmaster tools that it thinks some links are dubious and we're trying to find out why. We only now have 190 external links to the website, most are internal and from the website or our blog on a subdomain. The problem we think is that we generate the category and products pages all dynamically so the anchor text is looking the same. Will this potentially create issues for us? Dave
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
Anchor text for deep links?
Hi,
Link Building | | rayvensoft
I was wondering if anybody had some advice on what to do for deep link anchor text in the post penguin world? For the homepage, I am going with almost exclusively branded text with only small variations once in a while. For the deep links I was thinking of doing a mix of branded text with some additional text such as: "My Brand Name" + Red or "My Brand Name" + Blue Does anybody know if this is the best way to go, or is there any other advice? Thanks in advance.0 -
Anchor text diversity - post penguin.
Hi, It seems that achor text diversity is hugely important post penguin but what's the best strategy? What kind of anchor text should I be going for? As I understand it more that 60% of links with the keywords in trigger a google flag. For example are the following good examples for the term 'wedding singer'? local wedding singer, best wedding singer, wedding singer website, hire wedding singer. Would these cause triggers in google as all contain the keyword 'wedding singer'? Or should I be going for: click here, visit us, listen now, view a profile Obviously these words don't contain the anchor text 'wedding singer' but with a few exact match #wedding singer' anchor texts and good on page SEO will this mix give better results?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Should Penguin makes me question all reciprical links, even relevant ones?
Prior to Penguin, I had begun a link building campaign of sorts for a tourism bureau. All it was designed to do was leverage a wealth of relevant link opportunities that were right under our noses...the bureau's own members. These restaurants, hotels, attractions, etc are extremely relevant web sites with respect to the tourism bureau's target and niche. The links were to be in the form of image badges stating "Proud member of..." with brand-only alt text and title tags. I will focus on keeping these links a reasonable percentage of the overall domains linking into the site, I will vary the alt text throughout, and cultivate the links slowly over a 5-month period. But since the bureau's site already drives traffic to these individual member sites, the links we cultivate will end up being reciprocal. Even though they are natural in the purpose they serve, should we be worried, and consider abandoning the program?
Link Building | | VCOMM0 -
Trying to get links to a pdp of an ecommerce site
hi all i am working for a ecommerce site doing seo and i am thinking of starting a blog for one of the brands im trying to rank for on the site and then have some links from the brandreview.co.uk/blog to the pdp page of the ecommerse site that im working for, is this a good way to go about things
Link Building | | Westernoriental0