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
-
Link Building where link building is dead. Latest tactics in a land of content.
Hello, What is your latest link building techniques considering manual link building is basically dead, and you should really build good content to drive results. Link building has really become less important. It seems to be much more 10X content now. What would you recommend for basic link building considering this besides the 50 first Links video by Rand, which is excellent. Thanks, Bob
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Inbound link is follow link but we put no follow link back - is it beneficial for rankings?
Dear Moz Community, We are operating in a niche market, where there are not so many content marketing options. What we are left with are link exchanging with relevant sites that are on the same topic but to not directly compete with us. Now we know that if we link back to site A and site a links back to us - for google this is not a very good link. But, some of the sites we are exchanging links with, do not know the term follow vs no follow links. My question - if your link is to site A is a no follow link but they give us a follow link - does it mean thats a better option than a follow vs follow. Thanks for help!
Link Building | | advertisingcloud0 -
Ranking For Non-Context-Friendly Terms Without Anchor-Text
We are now at a point with Google where having a link profile that has a lot of exact match anchor text for a few main keyword targets is not a good thing. So, how do we rank for terms that do not fit into the content of your site, but are still good keyword targets. Here is an example from my situation. A good keyword target for my area and business that I am working for is "plumber riverside" or "plumber riverside ca." In a gramatical sense, these two/three words do not belong together in content, i.e they would not make a proper sentence being placed together, except with maybe a comma or period separating them. In fact, this term probably wouldn't even make a good sidebar link copy. Without having a link profile with "plumber riverside" as my most common anchor text, how can I let Google know that I should rank for this term? Anchor text used to be the go to but now you have to really minimize the use of it for exact match terms. Without on page content, it seems pretty hard. Any thoughts?
Link Building | | tonyflorespsa0 -
Outbound links
We are working with a large, global customer that has asked us to link to their website from about 5,000 pages of our website. The links would either point to one page on their website, or they would point to specific pages throughout their website. Is this a bad thing from an SEO perspective, as in - would either of us be penalized from search engines for doing this?
Link Building | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Buy links
I know that many of you are against the whole thing with buying links. Your feelings put aside. Will it be better for my site to buy links or even do link exchange? Haven´t the crawlers been thought by now how to find these untrue links? I have read somewhere that the stop after 100 links, aren´t they smarter than that?
Link Building | | mato0 -
Why are none of my incoming links showing up in SEOmoz or Google? How do I get good legit incoming links?
There are hundreds of sites that are linking to my website, but nobody is showing it. Google wont display any when using link:eugenecomputergeeks.com, and in webmaster tools it only shows 46 incoming links. SEOmoz shows only 3 links. This just isn't so. Why is this? I DESPERATELY need valid incoming links from well ranked websites , and having lots of trouble getting them. Nobody in town with a well ranked site seems to want to do a link exchange, and I've already made the mistake of buying my way into directories, which didn't do anything good for my rankings. Thanks!
Link Building | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
Anchor Text vs Rankings!
Let's say I have a page about houses for sale (which has the biggest number of search queries/month). I want to rank with that page for another variations like house for sale, and house sale. Now, if i build links only with anchor text **houses for sale **(presuming that Google is OK with that) and i will take top 3 for that KW, i will rank very high too for the other two combinations of words? Or Google treats different plural vs singular and the stop word for. This is an example based on site for one client of mine. His site is about Hotels in Mamaia (hoteluri in mamaia in romanian) and i build links with anchor text hoteluri in mamaia. For this KW i took pos 4 but for hoteluri mamaia i am on page 9 from Google.ro. These two combinations of words are 90% the same in my language. For you to know hoteluri mamaia has bigger numeber of search queries/month (6 600 vs 260).
Link Building | | maldiniii0 -
Link to those that link to you? Worthwhile?
We have thousands and thousands of sites that link to a domain we are working on, many with low page authority and high domain (bloggers, forum posts, etc). Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality? I'm not sure what method we would use, maybe some relevant blog comments or social votes. But curious if this could be an effective method.
Link Building | | iAnalyst.com0