Link building question

[goldjake1788]

ok so we paid the top firm in seo to help us build an seo strategy and i think we have a good one. We are changing our link building tactics and making more Pr related links and creating awesome content on blogs or our own site to generate traffic and links to our site. We have data from our engineer which should be interesting and we are going to sponsor events, do some link baiting with some of our articles, get a pr firm to get us some good articles on major sites and go to events around phily where we will have unique content and a unique perspective such as car shows ect. The problem is even though all the content will be linked to our site how do we link them. We got hit by penguin but in these articles or blogs should we use the anchor text for the word we are using. The company says dont do it right now bc we got hit with penguin and should only use the brand. I have no idea how only using the brand and not the keywords will magically make us rank for certain keywords. Anyone have an opinion. Thank you and we do pretty well with seo but we did get little bit of a hit with penguin that we are eliminating links and making a new way of thinking when it comes to link building.

We also just hired a designer so we are going to build 100s of pages on the site to increase seo with unique content and that is also a goal of ours for the year. We have two marketers on staff and 4 programmers so we are able to do anything. Our urls are terrible but the rest of the site is pretty good

[AdamThompson]

Your SEO firm is probably correct, in my opinion. Having an overly high percentage of your anchor texts be keywords is one of the factors that makes your site likely to get penalized by Penguin or other algorithmic penalties. See http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172839/Google-Penguin-Update-Impact-of-Anchor-Text-Diversity-Link-Relevancy

Your SEO firm has most likely determined that your backlink profile uses too many keyword anchor texts, and they are trying to fix the unbalance by building mostly non-keyword anchor texts for awhile. In other words, they are trying to dilute your too-keyword-focused anchor text portfolio. Here are two more articles you may find helpful:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/anchor-text-optimization-case-study-whats-natural/43404/ (written by yours truly)

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization

[AdoptionHelp]

The text in links pointing to a page is only one signal used by the search engines to rank a page for any particular keyword. There is also on-page optimizing, for example using the key phrase in the title tag and H1 tag.

I can't comment on the overall strategy of only linking with your brand name though, I haven't seen any compelling strategies for overcoming penguin other than getting on with white-hat tactics.