Making anchor text look more natural
-
Hi there,
I have recently been approached by a company looking to do some SEO work for them, having had a look at their link profile, they had being using a lot of exact match anchor and have seen a drop in the rankings, no surprise there.
I was thinking of asking the website where they have placed these links and changing them, so there is a mixture of exact, phrase, brand etc, what do you think? would this be best practice? or just leave these as they are and start building fresh links?
Kind Regards
-
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the link, very good read.
I also read this:
Clearly, after Panda 3.3, Google implemented some sort of threshold for what they feel is an appropriate ratio of anchor text that any website should have. Websites with a higher ratio than this threshold saw the value of all of those links completely discounted — it was as if they didn’t exist anymore
Does this mean going back to these websites where the exact match anchor text is a changing it to lets say phrase or brand will not make any difference?
-
Hi Gary,
I am currently working on a link profile which is very heavy in exact match anchors, by going deeper into this problem i noticed that there was such are large amount present because of footer, blogroll or site-wide links with the exact match anchor.
I suggest you use Open Site Explorer advanced report tool and filter on the exact match text which you would like to focus on, once you have the CSV export you can go through the list of domains linking in on that anchor, then you could use SpyOnWeb to check how many sites share the shame IP address, should you find that site shares the same ip address as a lot of other sites it's most likely part of a link farm and it would be best to request the link be completely removed. (You could also examine it's link profile and content to check its quality).
All good domains you find linking in you could request them to change the anchor slightly to something branded or even just the URL, although i would probably just leave the quality links alone and create good content to make people link in which would be 100% natural and would balance your link profile.
Kyle
-
I would say keep them if they are good links, but you would probably want to look at changing percentages of anchor text and adding in some more "natural" terms such as brand names and generic terms.
A good guideline to a natural backlink profile can be found here:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/post-penguin-seo-link-building-the-naked-url-truth/
Been referencing this one a lot recently as I find it's a great way of explaining types of anchor text.
-
Hi William,
They are actually placed on good websites, however they have just been excessive in using exact match anchor text which has done them no favours.
Let's say I go and change 40% of these to brand, phase etc would it not be suspicious to search engines that nothing on the page itself has changed apart from the anchor text?
Kind Regards
-
Are these sites spam sites? If they are legitimate links, there is rarely a chance it will effect rankings. If you however, get these and requested these links, it would negatively effect you at the end and you might want to just remove those bad sites and keep the good ones.
If sites are all good and just happens to have same match throughout, I would just contact the site to have them change it up a bit, whether it is a 4-5 word anchor text or simply the URL(very normal).
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
-
More than 20 % of exact match anchor text... can it be the reason ?
How do I know if i got it by penguin because my external anchor text is over optimised ? I have 80 external links and 22 of those are exact match, could it be the reason why I went from ranking 1 st for years on a keyword to ranking on 2 nd page for about a year now... Do you recommend trying to get new links or asking to change the existing one... I read that google doesn't treat links the same way if you change the anchor text, is it really the case ? For internal links should I also worry about exact match percentage or not ? is it better to have exact match internally or not ? PS : I redid my website in the meantime so it is hard to say where the issue is coming from. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Natural Fluctuation in Search Traffic
This is going to sound like a weird question... I'm curious to know whether there is a natural fluctuation in the actual number of searches being made online each week. It would be great to relate this to the performance of my own organic traffic each week. For example, if organic search traffic is down 10% week on week, is that because search in general is down 10%? Has anybody ever looking into this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ausmed0 -
TLA / Text Link Ads
Hi folks, Curious to hear what people know about the TLA situation since reports surfaced that they'd been de-indexed. It looks like it's all been quiet since those early reports. Not many people admit to using TLA so perhaps you've heard something on the grapevine... nudge nudge wink wink.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBarker0 -
What Makes Good Content for Category Pages
Hello, We're putting (roughly, depending on the category) 500 words under the products or categories under category pages. We're having a writer do these who has to learn the products from scratch. With over 100 categories, it's not possible for the client to write 500 words for each one. We're wondering, 1. What should go into a category description? 2. How do you prep a writer to write these, and is it possible to do so and get good content? I'm afraid that we're writing just words for long tails, and I know on the product pages, home page, and articles that it has to be the best content, probably written by the client himself if he is knowledgable enough. Open to your suggestions on what should be in these, how long they should be, and who should write them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to make my infogaphics interesting?
What is it that makes people share and spread infographics? How can I make my infographics interesting and encourage people to re-post it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | harrygardiner0 -
How do I make my URLs SEO friendly?
Hi all, I am aware that overly-dynamic URLs hurt a website's SEO potential and I want to fix mine. At present they look like this: http://www.societyboardshop.co.uk/products.php?brand=Girl+Skateboards&BrandID=153 What do I need to do to fix them please... do I add some code to the htaccess file? Many thanks, much apreciated. Paul.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul530 -
Anchor text help
Hello, I am a small website designer in Mexico.. as you know it is hard to rank in these keywords My main competitors appear with (diseño web = web design) on google.com.mx Almost 80% of the anchor text from my links are (diseño web Mexico =web design Mexico) If I search (diseño web Mexico =web design) on google.com.mx I appear on first page. If I search (diseño web = web design) on google.com.mx I appear on page 3. My questions: Is this because my anchor text is diseño web Mexico? should i change it to (diseño web = web design)? Or is it because (diseño web = web design) is a harder key word to rank? this is my website http://bit.ly/eKyWvr Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pixelar0 -
Multiple sites linking back with pornographic anchor text
I discovered a while ago that we had quite a number of links pointing back to one of our customer's websites. The anchor text of these links contain porn that is extremely bad. These links are originating from forums that seems to link between themselves and then throw my customers web address in there at the same time. Any thoughts on this? I'm seriously worried that this may negatively affect the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeorgeMaven0