Anchor text analysis
-
Hello!
I'm doing a systematic review of my site after getting a bit of a heavy punishment from google last month. I think things are going in the right direction, but wanted some advice on anchor text. Here is a link to the top 200 terms as exported from WMT;
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkGVm349qCtIdHYzR01EVDhBOHFIekJZS0FVbG9RN1E#gid=0
Can someone give me some advice on whether anything looks suspicious or not? or is it not that simple? My site is madegood.org.
Thanks so much in advance. I've had some fantastic help on here already, but really any advice is appreciated.
Cheers
-
Thanks for all your advice!
-
Well, it could just be that lots of organic search traffic was finding you through blog posts and resource content and then leaving the site right away. That's normal and OK - it can mean that they found what they wanted and then left. I wouldn't worry about that as a ranking factor - I doubt that it's going to cause any significant change in rankings in your niche.
-
Thanks Kane,
I did as you said and the one strange thing that sticks out is that engagement seems to be up by a significant amount- both page views and time spent on site. Everything else is down though, every referral source. Perhaps it could have been an engagement issue, as in, people were not spending long enough on my site?
-
The thing that looks odd to me is that 'disclaimer' is number 4- what's going on there!? Surely that's an internal link that's somehow being read as an external one?
-
Thanks, that's made it crystal clear!
Not sure why the hidden navigation is there but I'm sure I can get to the bottom of it.
Did you use a tool to flag these hidden elements up, or did you just look at the page source?
Thanks again, I'm very grateful you took the time to look at this
-
That looks like pretty good anchor text overall. I'm looking at your links in Open Site Explorer and they also look fine to me. Tons of branded anchor text is showing, which is good, and plenty of random anchor text as well. I really doubt that this has anything to do with a link-based penalty. I'd sooner expect some sort of on-site issues or change in competition.
Regarding this part: "after getting a bit of a heavy punishment from google last month" - I would open up Google Analytics and open up the date selector and select the day that traffic dropped off until now (eg March 18th through today). Then check the box that says "Compare to previous period".
Now, surf over to "Traffic Sources" in the left sidebar of Google Analytics and start looking for things that have dropped off significantly. Drop in landing pages? Organic Traffic? This will be a good indicator of why your traffic has dropped if you don't already know for sure.
-
If you look at the code for the page /bikes/how-to/check-a-rear-hub/, you'll see that there are two links that appear to be part of a pagination element
Chain Wear ». But no part of that actually shows on the page itself (user-facing).
As far as the link-to-content ratio, site is a little light on text, but heavy on links. Just completing the site by putting text in each of the "contents", "tools" and "parts" sections will help with that. I'm sure that's your plan, but since it's not done currently and you're having issues, it's worth pointing out.
Google doesn't like things like hidden text/links or too little text with too many links so these issues could be throwing up a red flag in Google's eyes.
-
Something that does stand out in that list is the relatively small amount of brand terms. One would think that a site like this would more links to the home page with branded terms than it looks like you've got. In that respect, I might say your links don't look as natural as they should.
-
Hi there BlastAM,
These are the Anchor Links from from webmaster tools, which I'm fairly sure are external(?).
i'm not sure i quite follow what you mean when you say I have 'some links in the code that aren't on the page'.
could you also explain what you mean by that last comment too. Sorry if I'm asking a stupid question!
i'm rebuilding the site from scratch at the mo', so all your technical suggestions are very useful.
Thanks so much!
-
I don't see anything in the anchor text that stands out as immediately problematic. Are these internal or external links?
It's hard to give more advice without more information, but one thing I see on your site is that you have some links in the code that aren't on the page. You should figure out how much of that is happening and why. Depending on the answer you find, it may be something to address.
Plus the link to content ratio is off a bit. You may want to add more content and group your inner links to lower the count.
-
Thanks Chris.
Is that a general concensus?
-
I think those look about as natural as they come.
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
-
How handle pages with "read more" text query strings?
My site has hundreds of keyword content landing pages that contain one or two sections of "read more" text that work by calling the page and changing a ChangeReadMore variable. This causes the page to currently get indexed 5 times (see examples below plus two more with anchor tag set to #sectionReadMore2 This causes Google to include the first version of the page which is the canonical version and exclude the other 4 versions of the page. Google search console says my site has 4.93K valid pages and 13.8K excluded pages. My questions are: 1. Does having a lot of excluded pages which are all copies of included pages hurt my domain authority or otherwise hurt my SEO efforts? 2. Should I add a rel="nofollow" attribute to the read more link? If I do this will Google reduce the number of excluded pages? 3. Should I instead add logic so the canonical tag displays the exact URL each time the page re-displays in another readmore mode? I assume this would increase my "included pages" and decrease the number of "excluded pages". Would this somehow help my SEO efforts? EXAMPLE LINKS https://www.tpxonline.com/Marketplace/Used-AB-Dick-Presses-For-Sale.asp https://www.tpxonline.com/Marketplace/Used-AB-Dick-Presses-For-Sale.asp?ChangeReadMore=More#sectionReadMore1 https://www.tpxonline.com/Marketplace/Used-AB-Dick-Presses-For-Sale.asp?ChangeReadMore=Less#sectionReadMore1
Technical SEO | | DougHartline0 -
Do search engines treat masked text differently than solid color fonts?
In my attempt to decrease page load times, I ditched my custom fonts for google fonts. I figured out how to apply CSS mask-image to make this blazing fast loading google font have a chalk texture, which was an awesome improvement over the 3-5 second load times for those locally hosted web fonts. I've read that Google penalize a site for poor contrast ratios between the background and text, but do search engines go by CSS or do they somehow compare the actual rendered site as an image? Using CSS mask-image to give my text that chalk appearance does produce minor transparent patches in text. So have I saved 3 seconds on page load just to have search engines knock points off for funky text issues? All input welcome. The temporary site is here. https://website-1b14f.firebaseapp.com/ Kevin
Technical SEO | | kwoolf0 -
Hidden text and mobile indexing
Hello, I believe mobile indexing 1 st is in place. Since then, does google give the same value to content that is hidden behind a tab (for example a question where you need to click on the + to see the answer) as content that would be directly visible ? Thank you,
Technical SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Text hidden by Java
We are developing a new website and intent to use Javascript to make the page more manageable on the screen with a show more / show less. For example http://www.tanzaniaodyssey1.com/tanzania/serengeti where a large amount of the content of the page is "hidden". from what i can see although google won't penalise us but am i right in saying that this content will not be indexed and will count for google ???? I need to make sure that this text is indexed but i also don't want to have horrendously long un-user friendly pages, **Does any one have a way round this ? (could i put the words in a <noscript tag="" ...<="" strong=""></p></noscript>**
Technical SEO | | EdD-DigitalPotion0 -
Link Anchor Text
When we have run a Open Site Explorer analysis on our own site, it says that for all our internal links the Link Anchor Text is 'Help with logging in' I am a bit confused as to why it shows that. That text does appear in the header of the page, but is not the first piece of text. Why is it happening on our site?
Technical SEO | | MattAshby
Why do I not see this on other sites?
What affect does this have on our ranking?
What's the best fix? Example page that we ran on Open Site Explorer: www.rightboat.com/search?manufacturer=Beneteau&model=Antares+9.800 -
Footer Links with same anchor text on all pages
We have different websites targeted at the different services our company provides. (e.g. For our document storage services, we have www.ukdocumentstorage.com. For document management, we have www.document-management-solutions.co.uk). If we take the storage site for example, every single page has a link in the footer to our document management site, with the anchor text 'Cleardata Document Management' SEOMoz is telling me that these are seen as external links (as they are on a different URL's), and I'm just clarifying that would this be a major possible factor in the website not ranking highly? How should I rectify this issue?
Technical SEO | | janc0 -
Will Google index a site with white text? Will it give it bad ratings?
Will google not rank a site bc pretty much all the copy is white (and the background is all white)? Here's the site in question: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6w24f6h5p0zaxhg/Garrison_PLAY.vs2-static.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fwudppvwy2khpau/t43NozpG3E/Garrison_PLAY.vs3.jpg thanks--if you need me to clarify more let me know TM Humphries LocalSearched.com
Technical SEO | | CloudGuys0 -
Title tag same text as H1?
What is the group's opinion on whether or not the <title>tag should have the exact same text as the <h1> tag on the same page? Obviously both should contain the phrase that page is optimized for but is it better to have them be variants of each other, or both the same and maybe equal to the key phrase that page is optimized for? Thanks.</p> <p>Example:</p> <blockquote style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p>title: los angeles blue widgets</p> <p>h1: los angeles blue widgets</p> </blockquote> <p>Or,</p> <blockquote style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p>title: los angeles blue widgets</p> <p>h1: blue widgets in los angeles</p> </blockquote> <p>Where the page is trying to optimize for "los angeles blue widgets"</p></title>
Technical SEO | | scanlin0