Should we Have Our Anchor Text Changed?

[dustyabe]

Unfortunately, we used a SEO company to do some link building for us and they used a lot of marketed keywords as anchor text instead of branded. About a month into the project, we saw a drop in ranking for those keywords. From what I've read, Google is cracking down on marketed keywords in anchor text (when it is done in a spammy looking way). I have contacted the company that did the work and they said they could update the anchor text. So my questions are:

1. Should we asked them to change the anchor text to branded keywords or should we just leave them?

2)  If we do have them changed, do you think Google will look at that as another spammy move?

Any input would be great. Lesson learned not to used a reputable SEO company and for us not to monitor how they were submitting links.

Ron

[dustyabe]

Again, thanks for the input from everyone. One of the things that I have noticed is that they did some link building to some specific categories on our website with specific anchor text and they ranked well at the beginning and the dropped off the face of the earth while some of the other categories that they didn't do link building on have continued to rank ok. Also, about a week ago we noticed our organic search results drop significantly. Could that be an identifier that Google has penalized our site due to those potentially spammy looking links?

[NakulGoyal]

I agree with Mat. I think it's just depends how much of an effort it is. Think of it like this, what if these links were not created by you...but a competition trying to beat you. Could you do anything then ? Not much. So if you think from that context, time and resources (and money) is better spent on building better content and links vs trying to remove links.

[matbennett]

Not everyone will agree, however I'd say leave them for now - unless you are seeing anything particularly worrying.

Bad links could case a ranking drop for two reasons: On one hand you could be getting a penalty - even without a warning in webmaster tools. On the other it could just be that you are not getting the benefit from those links that you were.

The second is the most common. The remedy to that is "build more, better, links". That same remedy solves a lot of other problems too.

If a link is poor quality you may as well get it removed rather than changing the anchor. However I'd still rather put resources in to new links rather than removing old ones unless you are particularly concerned.

[dustyabe]

We haven't received an unnatural link warning message from Google in our webmaster counsel yet. Just don't want to take the risk of getting one.

It is a pretty high number if exact match anchor text. I think it is around 20 links per key word anchor text and around 15 sets of matched keywords. They look like a lot of directory submissions and I don't know if they are related. I don't know how they can get them changed (I'm almost afraid to ask).

Thanks for the input.

[NakulGoyal]

Ron 1. Is it a considerably high number of links ? 2. Are these sites related ? 3. Are they all similar kinds of links ? If not, how can they control them so easily ? If there are any visible patterns of artificial links and if they are not related, you could essentially keep a cleaner profile by removing the links completely. Did you also remove a un-natural links warning ? If yes, then definitely consider removing the links. If not, and the links are good quality, you could maybe tweak them to brand, brand + anchor and so on...just not too many exact match anchor text links. Just do a complete audit of your link profile and act accordingly. I hope this helps.