Is Google now punishing anchor text?

[Benjamin379]

Hi All,

I was just wondering if Google is starting to punish anchor text links? I've noticed that one of my clients domains has slightly reduced and they have slipped a few places in rankings for a key term since. I found this bizarre as the last few links I built were both relevant and strong but I did use an anchor text?

Any feedback would be useful, I'm slightly confused here?

[MikeGracia]

I would download an OSE report set to external links only, to entire root domain. Use an advanced report if you have the credits.

Then I would check the anchor text usage to each of the key pages.

Try to do quality link work - linkbait rather than link 'building' - Yer, I know, everyone says that - but really! Write some decent articles that people will WANT to read - if they want to read them, they will want to share/link to them.

If you do end up 'building' links though, do so by really high quality methods. Manually reach out for guest posts on decent blogs - tie this in with Google+ author profile links to the sites G+ account (the authors), and in terms of anchors, be natural! Go for what the blogger thinks should be used - usually this will be either www.domain.com/ or 'Brand Name'.

In short - don't try to manipulate your anchor text in order to gain organic Google rankings - this kind of practise is now more out of date than ever, won't likely work very well anymore, and could in fact be counter productive.

Hope that helps! Stick with it, do lots of research, start to identify and engage with a site's audience both on-page and off, and you will be fine

[Benjamin379]

Many thanks for your reply, I will assess the link profile as see if there is a weight on one of the keywords.

[eyepaq]

Hi,

Yes, there is a special filter for over optimisation related with anchor text.

If you have / build a lot of links with teh same anchor text - and overall in your link profile that dosen't really look natural you can receive a filter on that anchor text and only on that anchor text - nothing else is affected.

(in some cases on some variation of the anchor text).

So if you only lost traffic for one keyword that might be the case.

usually it's a manual action as far as I've seen in the past - but there is also an algo in place for this as far as I've understood (personably though I've only encounter manual action against anchor text).

In order to solve this issue - you need to clean / edit /delete some bad links that are looking un-natural using this anchor text.

Your anchor text assessment within your link profile should be the first step to solve this.

I don't know the domain and keyword so I don't know if EMD is an issue - but it's also something you can review (is the keyword the same with the domain name ?)

Cheers.