Will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text attract Penguin’s wrath?

[anand53]

I'm working on a site for a serviced apartment site http://www.alcove.co.in/ which offers apartments in 9 cities in India.  Site was ranking in 1st page of Google for “serviced apartment + city” for 7 cities until sometime in Jan 2013.

However organic traffic has been gradually falling since sometime in September 2012 (40% fall this month over same period last year).  There’s been no sudden fall in traffic which we may link with any Penguin update. There have been no warning messages in Google WMT.

Even today the site ranks in 1st page for 3 cities;  however  ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’ which  was  the biggest revenue earner, is not ranked in first 5 pages.

My questions are whether

1. will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text  will attract Penguin’s wrath,

2. does Google makes allowance for case  when  company's name includes keywords. In our case, company name is Alcove Service apartments,

3. could there be some other reason for fall in ranking/traffic?

The distribution of anchors (external links, multiple links from same domain are counted) is :

percent
Keywords                        34%
brand+keywords            43%
Natural                               4%
only brand                         11%
URL                                     7%

For the above,

• Brand = ‘Alcove Service apartments’ or  ‘Alcove Serviced apartments’

• brand+keywords = various combinations of ‘alcove’ + [‘guest houses’ or ‘hotels’ or ‘accommodation’]  + city1 + city2…

Intriguingly, Open Site Explorer analysis of domain metrics (Domain Authority, Followed Linking Root Domains, etc) ranks Alcove higher than all but one site appearing in 1st page of Google for ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’. Most  of alcove’s  links are from article directories (no spun articles were used), directories and link exchanges with relevant sites.

Any suggestions and guidance on what we could do to remedy the situation would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

[Dr-Pete]

Honestly, given that you currently have relatively few cities, consolidating might not have a big impact. I'd be cautious going forward, if you were going to expand into hundreds of markets or started having a ton of results under every market, but for now it probably makes more sense to improve your link profile and try to get some content on the site that isn't entirely search results.

[anand53]

Thanks, Dr. Peter. That's exactly the sort of inputs I was looking for.

Yes, as you notice, we have started links clean-up : deleting, changing anchor or disavowing.

It is hard to develop great content for a list of service apartments in a city. At my suggestion, client agreed to add 1 page for each property ( you will see more details...  link below tariff table for each apartment) in April 2013.

Do you think we should combine all cities (e.g. http://www.alcove.co.in/tariff-bangalore.html )into a single page with a search form?

[cbielich]

I was referring to the Nike back link as an example of what a "natural" anchor text profile would look like.

The majority of their links are Branded or URL (Nike).

Almost all the links contain the word "Nike" In It

A few contain their specific product keywords only (not Nike)

Its a great example to see percentage ratios compared to a spammy back link profile

[Dr-Pete]

My gut reaction is that this sounds much more Panda-like. We've seen many sites with geo-targeted pages and searches gradually lose ranking and traffic over the past couple of years. The problem is that Google has just generally started frowning on spinning out long-tail phrases just to target keywords, and in situations like "serviced apartments + city" I'm afraid that the content quite often ends up being thin.

In your case, though, I'm only seeing about 400 pages in Google's index, so it doesn't look like there are very many variations or that it's enough volume to trigger Panda-scale problems. I don't think these pages are very strong, as they're basically search results with minor variations in the copy/title/etc., but I'd be surprised to see a sudden ranking drop because of these pages.

Your link profile does seem to be populated with a lot of low-value directories and you're using long, exact-match anchor strings. It may not be the branded text so much as a lot of text that just looks unnatural. I also notice, though, that some of the links we have in OSE appear to be gone now:

http://impulsesdirect.org/detail/link-3883.htm

You may have started removal - I'm not sure. You could remove some of these, but frankly, you won't be left with a lot. Anything you do moving forward is going to have to involved building or attracting higher quality links and developing content that is more than just directory-style pages. Google just doesn't value niche directories the way they used to, and I think that attitude is here to stay, unfortunately (I have a former client in the same boat).

[anand53]

Karl,

I too feel that studying Nike's anchor profile would be frustrating because small businesses like ours cannot achieve that. Further, I am not sure that my site was hit by Penguin.

'serviced apartments bangalore' constitutes only 0.6% of total links. But combinations of this with other cities and terms was what I pushed most. 'Bangalore' occurs is 47% of links along with brand 'alcove' and other keywords (not all 47% of anchors  have serviced apartments).

If articles' content is good and are posted on Article directories with PR > 1, can they do harm?

Thanks

[KarlBantleman]

Whilst Cesar is right than Nike has a perfect link profile, they don't really need to do much link building because they get it all done naturally for them. 99% of companies don't have the social interaction (or the budget!) that Nike does so it isn't really that helpful to study their linking profile.

Saying that, the majority of your links should be branded because when people are talking about you they are unlikely to link your website via an anchor text keyword. You need to create some linkable assets so, for example, content based around the cities you have apartments in  and create some content that bloggers will want to have on their website.

Was "service apartments Bangalore" the keyword you pushed the most by any chance? Article directories have been seriously devalued and directories haven't been worthwhile for years now (unless they are really good!). I suggest looking through your backlink profile on OSE and Webmaster Tools and start to get rid of the article links because they will be doing you more harm than good.

[cbielich]

Look at this and study it

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.nike.com

That's what it should look like