What are best practices for anchor text diversification in a post-penguin world?
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There is growing concern for this topic as the best white-hat tactics generally allow you to choose your own anchor text (eg. guest posting and infographics)
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Look at the percentages on sites ranking well in your niche. Also look at some big brands like Gnc and note the natural breakdown of their anchors between keyword anchors, brand anchors, urls anchors, brand + keyword anchors, click here anchors, etc.
It's not an exact science but should help you get a better grasp of what Google is looking for with a
"natural" backlink profile. Good luck! -
I find generateanchors.com very useful to generate a huge list of natural anchor texts. It mixes everything pretty well.
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The only actual link building I do is to focused on building trust and authority for the domain as a whole with the vast majority of 'acquired' links going to the homepage and main categories using anchor text like domain.com, domain, www.domain.com, domain.com - category, http://www.domain.com, http://www.domain.com/category etc, etc, etc.
So besides internal linking, I don't worry about anchor text on incoming links. In time, internal pages begin attracting links on their own ...as it should be.
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Most people like to use a blend of linking to your pages that include your brand name plus keyword, a certain percentage of just your brand, and then the smallest amount using the anchor text you want to get ranked for.
Also be sure to so the same on the social networks too.
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