Remove links or change anchor text?
-
I am currently in the process of cleaning up the link profile for a website that has been hit by Penguin thanks to loads of links from free directories with exact match keyword anchor texts (about 200 root domains from total of 300 root domains).
I was wondering whether it's best to remove these un-natrual keyword anchor text links altogether, or change the anchor texts to brand (domain name, domainname.com, www.domainname.com, http://www.domainname.com)?
I am currently trying to remove these links but was thinking it would be quicker to get to a healthier link profile (in terms of brand/commercial anchor text split) by altering the anchor texts and not removing them. Some of these directories are the worst of the worst on the other hand.
Also note that I'm only really getting about a 30% response rate from the owners of these directories.
Any thoughts?
Many thanks in advance.
-
Both of these comments are on target, that said, I would remove any links you can.... within reason. And, I am generally a big fan of updating content. Regardless of the successes of the page. I think fresh is good, it keeps people coming back......... cheers!
-
you're lucky that is a manageable number. i would remove all crap directory links since you are saying they are the worst of the worst it can only hurt you.
-
I've recently undertaken the same task and I decided to make a decision based on the quality of the directory. If you currently have a low amount of back links with your brand/domain in them then changing the anchor text on some of the links will definitely help you build a more natural and strongly branded profile.
Install a page rank toolbar if you don't have one already and check the PR on the home page of each directory. If it comes up as 0 then rather just remove the link (if possible) as it's either a low quality directory to begin with or it's been totally devalued by Google.
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
-
Disavow links from legit sites but have spammy link profiles?
I'm currently doing a backlink audit for our site with a LOT of backlinks. Some of the linking sites are legitimate business websites in our industry who have linked to us for a totally legitimate reason (we have good content!). However, these businesses themselves have a spammy backlink profile—that is, the only sites linking to that site are obvious link farm sites. Here is an illustration: spammyseolinks.com; payforseo.xyz; blackhat.ru ==all link to==> legitbusiness.com ==links to==> mysite.com Should I disavow this backlink? I guess it's not really giving me much SEO worth since it surely been branded a spammy junk domain, but then again, it's a real website that we've earned a link from because we're doing stuff the right way. Is it hurting or helping me?
Link Building | | THandorf0 -
Getting a sitewide links from one domain as oppsed to few links from certain pages, a good, bad or horrible idea?
Hello, I have a website that is performing really well in Google for country specific Real Estate Website. I have had this site for just about 2 years and I have 4600+ indexed pages, and about 50 of my main keywords appear in top 10 results on Google. I have now started a second site with a brand new domain, its only about 2 months old. This one is a Travel website and again its country specific (same country that real estate website is performing well in) and since its still building up the content and has barely a couple of backlinks, I am thinking of adding a linkback to it from my Real Estate Site. Is it a good idea to add a site wide link back from header section of the real estate website to my travel website? Both sites has same country and most of the keywords in both relate to this country. Or will I be better off adding a few text links from few pages with best Page Authority? Or - do you suggest that I do not link the two at all? Both sites are hosted on different servers, with different IP's and one is on windows server created in asp.net while another is a magento site. Any advidce / insight will be much appreciated and thank you in advance.
Link Building | | waituk_sanjeev0 -
Drop in Rankings After Removing Links
So I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before? I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this? Thanks
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
Too Many Links???
SEOMOZ is telling me I have more than 100 links on quite a few of my pages, and I cant seem to find out what links they are finding. Like for instance on this page http://standupguys.biz/what-we-haul/commercial-junk-removal-services/computer-removal-recycling/ It is telling me that I have 117 hyper links (which is WAY too high). Can anyone explain to me where these are coming from, and how I can avoid this?? Please and thank you.
Link Building | | Caseman0 -
Blog traffic / link ratio? (Esimated of how much traffic will result in a link)
Hi, Was wondering if people could please tell me some estimates of how much traffic is likely to gain links to a blog post? For example 1,000 hits = 1 link, Hence 10,000 hits = 10 links to a blog post? I understand there is no magic ratio I just want to know what people have achieved. I’m after averages not just a one off really successful blog post too. Please specify the topic you achieve this in e.g. SEO, photography, business, heath... etc.
Link Building | | charles10 -
Too many external links vs linking root domains - good or bad?
Hi guys, After the latest Linkscape update, we noticed that our website have 424,671 external links with 4,395 linking root domains, so roughly 100 links/domain. Does Google consider this to be a negative thing or we do not need to worry about it. Many thanks. David
Link Building | | sssrpm0 -
Changing backlinks anchor text
Hi, I've read a few blog post here that suggests the strength of building links using your brand as an anchor text. This supposedly gives the site authority. Currently a chunck of the back links to my homepage are on generic terms i'm trying to rank for which doesn't seem to be working very well. I was thinking of contacting the various webmasters to change the anchor text to that of the site brand name but wondering if this will signal a manipulation of links to the search engines and potentially could be flagged as paid links? Has anybody done this before and what is the danger of doing this? Thanks Duke
Link Building | | clickangel0