Anchor text after the recent Panda update

[vlddlv]

Hi everyone,

I just read this article: http://goo.gl/GkgUr and I can confirm this is true because one of my websites drastically lost its rank last week due to high percentage of targeted keyword within back links.

Thus, what I'm worrying about is the anchor text within back links. I'm about to launch a new web site soon that will be publishing lots of landing pages for a travel niche. What I initially thought is to optimize landing page by page, so when the current page ranks well to move on to next one and so on. I thought that, by ranking a single landing page well, will have some positive impact to the rest of landing pages.

But, after a lot of time spent on studying link building strategies, I decided to spread back links among landing pages equally. I will try to get as much as possible back links from the relevant content and high quality sites (press releases, guest posting, link exchange, social networks promotion). Please correct me on this one if you disagree.

According to the above article, the recent google panda update calculates a percentage of keywords among anchor text and it would be the best to keep those at less than 30%, including "link", "here", "domain.com" etc.

For instance, lets say that my website counts 500 landing pages and every single one targets a different low competition exact keyword. So, if I start building back links equally for each of the landing pages and I want to cover each one with a back link from a relevant content, what should I use for the anchor text? Initially I thought the keyword should be the anchor text, but after I read the article I'm not so sure any more.

I guess search engines would say something like: "Ok, there are 500 landing pages and 500 different anchor texts pointing to different pages that belongs to domain.com", perhaps this should increase TLD's authority but what will happen to the landing pages? Would search engines (primarily google) see them as a 100% single anchor text and harm the rank?

I really appreciate your help.

Thank you!

[Dr-Pete]

It's hard for me to translate that into what the real anchor text would look like, but I think that targeting "/landing-page1" with "landing page 1" every time you build a link is definitely not a good idea.

[vlddlv]

Hi

Thank you for the explanation. Please take a look at the attached example displaying exactly how I was thinking to structure the links. I'm talking links from guest posts and other relevant content I might have influence on. Besides that, I hope I'll get enough links from people who likes the content.

The question is, what if no one actually links back my landing pages and I'm left with all those pages linked from a single relevant page (anchored with 100% exact keyword). Is it going to harm the site and do you think my strategy is wrong? Any better advices?

Thank you!

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[Dr-Pete]

So far (and this is based on very limited data), it appears that Penguin 2.0 targets many of the same tactics that Penguin 1.0 did, just on a deeper level, across more pages, and probably with a bit less forgiveness. So, I think it's safe to say that anchor text manipulation is still a factor in the new Penguin update.

I agree with Mark that it's dangerous to think in terms of pure percentages, as it's probably more complex than that, and may be dependent on a mix of factors, including the SERP "neighborhood" you're in. The problem with any aggressive manual link-building is that it's prone to looking artificial, so it's important to look for ways to both build and attract links, which naturally creates a variety of anchor text. As long as you're building by hand, it's going to be hard not to "over-optimize" (for lack of a better term).

I definitely think it's a good idea to diversify across landing pages. If you're going to build links manually, I'd just be careful not to use the same tactics on every landing page. That pattern is going to look more obvious when Google sees it across the whole site. Mix it up as much as you can, not just anchor text, but the actual link sources and types of links. It's really easy to carry one tactic too far that's ok in small quantities.

[EGOL]

http://goo.gl/GkgUr

If you post shortened URLs in a forum a lot of people will not visit them because they are uncertain of their distination.

... just sayin'

[PottyScotty]

So again I would look at the competition and look at ratio of their deep link to home page links.  I have focused much more on using internal links to pass juice on and use of anchor text, I have found the pages I deep linked to suffered the most, the pages that had no or very few back links to seem to have done better if I have good internal links to them.

[vlddlv]

Thanks a lot for the advice. Any thoughts on the other question is spreading money kw back links among landing pages better or it's more useful to rank page by page?

[PottyScotty]

Each industry / keyword is different, what works for one industry does not mean it will work for another.  % of brand vrs money making kw's vrs white noise (click here, etc) will really depend on what sector you are in.  My advice would be look at the link profile of the top 3 sites in your industry and match what they do then slowly improve on it.

If the top 3 ranking sites on average have say 7% White noise links, 60% branded and 33% money making kw's, then that would be what I would aim for.  I have learned over the last 12 months that one brush does not fit all!