Link Building And Anchor Text Placement
-
Hi everyone,
I can't seem to find a concrete answer on how anchor text is going, so I'm hoping you all can shed some light on it. We were asked to do a few guest blog posts, and I wanted to figure out what's the most effective way to use the backlinks. Granted, I know user experience is most important, but since we have control over the topic, I can tailor it so that won't be a problem. Other than user experience, how should I approach it? Things I'm considering:
1. Should I use branded text or keyword text? Kemp & Ruge Law Group vs car accident attorney? I've seen some reports of exact match anchor text causing some penalties, but I'm thinking that's for like thousands of links. We barely have any.
2. Should we point the links to our homepage to help our domain authority or to the page with the keyword phrase we want to rank higher?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Great, thanks so much!
-
If these are your friends' websites, then it should be no problem. You just want to make sure you're getting guest posts on legitimate sites, and not shady spam sites with ulterior motives and questionable backlink profiles.
-
I know this is vague, but what's the criteria for "high quality?" We were looking at doing this for a few of my friends who practice in other areas of law than we do. They don't have any red flags in their back links, and we are all tied to the same industry (if that matters, I thought it did?) but they aren't extremely popular or anything. Does "high quality" mean they have to get a good amount of traffic and press or just not violate any guidelines?
I'm sure that's a tough question to nail down, but appreciate any thoughts you might have.
Always appreciative,
Ruben
-
Penguin penalizes sites that have a large amount of over-optimized anchor text, so my advice would be to mix it up. Have some links lead to inner pages using keyword anchor text, and have other links lead to your homepage with your brand name. Include suboptimal anchor text like "click here" or the URL.
Just mix it up and don't overdo it. Make sure the blogs you are guest posting on are high quality, and make sure you're getting backlinks from sources other than guest posts. Don't be spammy.
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
-
If I use links intag instead of "ahref" tag can Google read links inside div tag?
Hi All, Need a suggestion on it. For buttons, I am using links in tag instead of "ahref". Do you know that can Google read links inside "div" tag? Does it pass rank juice? It will be great if you can provide any reference if possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pujan.bikroy0 -
Weird Site is linking to our site and links appears to be broken
I have got a lot of weird links indexed from this page: http://kzs.uere.info/files/images/dining-table-and-2-upholstered-chairs.html When clicking the link it shows 404. Also, the spam score is huge. What do you guys suggest to do with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Miniorek
Could it be done by somebody to get our rankings down or domain penalized? Best Regards
Mike & Alex0 -
Linking to own homepage with keywords as link text
I recently discovered, that previous SEO work on a client's website apparently included setting links from subpages to the homepage using keywords as link text that the whole website should rank for. i.e. (fictional example) a subpage about chocolate would link to the homepage via "Visit the best sweet shop in Dallas and get a free sample." I am dubious about the influence this might have - anybody with any tests? I also think that it is quite weird when considering user friendliness - at least I would not expect such a link to take me to the homepage of the very site I was just on, probably browsing in a relevant page. So, what about such links: actually helpful, mostly don't matter or even potentially harmful? Looking forward to your opinions! Nico
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Directory Listings with anchor text = Should we just Delete them all?
Hi Dr Moz'ers So our ex-contracted SEO "experts" have a enlisted our website to 40 odd directories with the same key word and copy. Is it best to just delete them all to avoid a possible negative SEO/Google outcome? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | supps0 -
Excessive navigation links
I'm working on the code for a collaborative project that will eventually have hundreds of pages. The editor of this project wants all pages to be listed in the main navigation at the top of the site. There are four main dropdown (suckerfish-style) menus and these have nested sub- and sub-sub-menus. Putting aside the UI issues this creates, I'm concerned about how Google will find our content on the page. Right now, we now have over 120 links above the main content of the page and have plans to add more as time goes on (as new pages are created). Perhaps of note, these navigation elements are within an html5 <nav>element: <nav id="access" role="navigation"> Do you think that Google is savvy enough to overlook the "abundant" navigation links and focus on the content of the page below? Will the <nav>element help us get away with this navigation strategy? Or should I reel some of these navigation pages into categories? As you might surmise the site has a fairly flat structure, hence the lack of category pages.</nav> </nav> </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress1 -
How to ping the links
When i do link building for my website, how can i let the search engines know about that. is there any way of pinging?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa0 -
Links from tumblr
I have two links from hosted tumblr blogs which are not on tumblr.com. So, website1 has a tumblr blog: tumblr.website1.com And another site website2.com also uses the a record/custom domains option from tumblr but not on a subdomain, which is decribed below: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains Does this mean that all links from such sites count as coming from the same IP in google's eyes? Or is there value in getting links from multiple sites because the a-record doesn't affect SEO in a negative way? Many thanks, Mike.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team740 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0