Does google really care if anchor text is the "brand name"?
-
I have read a lot about how it is a good idea to build links with your "brand name" as the anchor text. I am somewhat skeptical about all this. I suspect that the only thing that you need to do is have a wide variety of anchor text, some no follow links, and some links without any anchor text at all or just your URL. IDoes anyone have an opinion on this? Also I am somewhat confused about what a "brand name" is anyway. Obviolusly it applies to words like "Apple Computers" or seomoz but can I "make" my own name, i.e. Paul W. Matthews, into a "brand Name" aulby putting it in the title of my home page and just using it a lot as anchor text? If yes, is this a good idea?
thanks,
Paul
-
Hi Paul,
You ask interesting questions, the answers of which are all subjective really. Yes, a wide variety of anchor text is a good thing. As your site gains history, it will also naturally gain a link profile. Every site's link profile is a little different. Some sites, like "Apple" for instance, probably have much heaviier percentage of branded anchor text than your local family-owned computer store. If you are chugging along and all of a sudden something drastically changes your link profile, this might or might not cause problems with rankings in the SERPs. Some wild fluctuations, even in smaller businesses, can be quite normal, particularly if there was a big news event surrounding their business (perhaps they were acquired by a much larger company) or something of that sort.
You are correct in how you are defining briand names (IMHO). Yes, it absolutely could end up being your name. In fact, I encourage everyone who works and writes online to consider themselves, personally, a "brand" in addition to whatever other businesses they are involved with. This is one thing that makes Google+ so perplexing to me because it totally confuses personal and professional brands (hopefully they'll sort that out soon).
Yes, you absolutely could turn your name into a brand name. It doesn't even take putting it on your site anywhere. I an an in-house SEO for several websites, and one of them, one I built, has "Dana Tan" as it's next most often used anchor text next to its brand "Celebrate Communion." The site is young and tiny, so I assume this will change over time. This came about as a results of my blog commenting where I actually sign with my real name instead of trying to stuff in keywords and be all spammy
That being said, when I'm analyzing reports, I do not consider "Dana Tan" to be a "branded search term" for the site "Celebrate Communion." I do however consider it a branded search term for my SEO blog.
All that being said, yes, it's a very good thing to have branded search. That traffic converts at a higher rate and a much lower cost per conversion (if you are using any paid campaigns) than other traffic because they are predisposed to you. In most cases, branded terms will be the majority of your anchor text, with, hopefully, a wide range of other terms filling in the rest.
Hope that helps, and I apologize for the spacing issues in my response. My Mac doesn't like to double space in SEOMoz.
Dana
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
-
Nofollow links showing up in Google Search Console
If some nofollow links are showing up in Google Search Console, does that mean they are indeed passing link juice?
Link Building | | BrightonRecoveryCenter0 -
Direct from one website toanother but different domain name
i have two web site same subject but two different name how can i direct ?
Link Building | | fabric-fabric0 -
My Domain Authority is 1 and has number "0" link from Root Domains! What is my fault?
My website has started from August of this year, but number of Domain Authority (DA) is 1 and has number "0" from root domains when i checked by moz addon on firefox. I find it very unusual and I am worried about it. does anyone can explain why is that ? My website is: https://adtvietnam.vn . I had 10 --> 20 keywords on page 1 of google.com.vn. p/s: i am really not good at english. i wrote that words by translate.google.com. I hope everyone can understand me and God i need your help ^_^
Link Building | | lthanhthe5s0 -
To know effect on our Website rank in Google Search results
Ours is Property Advertising Company. And we have agents and consultants working from other areas in providing property for advertising in our website. So we collect all the data (5000 data nearly) and upload in one stretch directly to our database. I would like to know whether this process will affect our ranking in google search results because when we upload 5000 data, the links in our website also increases.
Link Building | | Rajesh.Chandran0 -
Anchor text for deep links?
Hi,
Link Building | | rayvensoft
I was wondering if anybody had some advice on what to do for deep link anchor text in the post penguin world? For the homepage, I am going with almost exclusively branded text with only small variations once in a while. For the deep links I was thinking of doing a mix of branded text with some additional text such as: "My Brand Name" + Red or "My Brand Name" + Blue Does anybody know if this is the best way to go, or is there any other advice? Thanks in advance.0 -
Forgot the name of a cool SEO Tool... Help!
I recently discovered a cool SEO tool. I didn't write it down, save it, bookmark, etc... And now I can't remember the name of the tool for the life of me, but I'd really like to use it again. I was hoping I could list of the features that I remember, and one of you Mozzers know what I'm talking about. It was a backlink analysis tool. It had a free version, and after you performed so many searches/searched so many backlinks, you had to pay. From what I remember it was a fairly nominal fee with the most popular package in around $25. The reason that I liked it so much was you could take an OSE csv file, dump it in there, and it would sort all of the links by link type, i.e, footer, comment, directory, etc... Then it would put it all into a nice pie chart for you and show you the % of the total links that each link type made up. It would also analyze the anchor text and would show you every anchor text used, and the % of the total each one made up.
Link Building | | stevefidelity0 -
Anchor text internal links
Hello, I read about a practice (also suggested by EasyWP SEO plugin) whereby I should place on my current page (call it page A) an internal link to another page (call it page B) using as anchor text the keywords I want page A to rank for. I dont really understand this and it is a cause of great confusion in my head... Can someone explain this to me and why this would be good practice? I would have thought that having as anchor text to page B a keyword I want page A to rank well for would steal juice from page A and give it to page B? Or am I missing something else? Thanks !
Link Building | | dpaq20110 -
Rel="canonical" or text link?
Lets say I have a commercial website that nobody will link to so I create a non commercial website with some awesome content that is highly linkable. I then get 30 - 40 quality links pointing to this site which I then either rel ="canonical" back to my main site to the page with the replica content or do I simply add a text link from the new site to the old sites homepage. Which would benefit my commercial site most? We are seeing the strategy of building a non commercial site for links becoming more and more popular. The second question is is it worth the effort for in effect one backlink?
Link Building | | fazza470