Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Total Exact Match Anchor Text Percentage or a Few High Quality Exact Match Backlinks, which is better?
-
Hello,
I was wondering if anyone could help me. I am trying to rank a web page for a competitive regional search term.
Upon inspecting all the competitors’ backlinks they appear to using an overly high exact match anchor text to rank on the first page for this keyword.
Somewhere in the region of 15 – 55% exact match anchor text. So the question is what does big G provide a heavier weighting for,
A.) The total percentage of exact match anchor text for all your backlinks, until it reaches the point of over optimization. A higher percentage up to about 60% will help you rank in the top 3. Meaning I should change a 1,000+ backlinks on multiple domains to the exact match anchor text.
B.) Or just a few backlinks with the exact match anchor text but from really high quality domains with a ‘Majestic SEO’ Trust and Citation Flow above 40.
Any help would be appreciated, exact match anchor text is meant not to work but it still does.
-
Hello Chris,
Thank you for replying to my question. It is a difficult one, I think as a company we will have to go with a safer long term strategy and see how it pans out. Maybe a PR stunt, instead of exact match backlinks.
Kind regards
Rob
-
Hello Malcom,
Thank you for replying to my question. In theory; I agree with this, producing high quality pages for the end user. However in reality for competitive niches, it does not matter how good your landing page is, it will not rank in a competitive niche. As all the competitors have such inflated exact match anchor text backlinks.
We will definitely look at improving our landing pages as a long term strategy.
Kind regards
Rob
-
You know Tom, it sounds like you might have excessive "exact match" links on the mind : ) and that can be a limitation to you in today's search. The sites at which you can get exact match anchor text these days may not pass the value they once were able to and Google doesn't use anchor text to establish relevance to a search query the way it once did, either.
Are there sites whose rankings are being held up by exact match links? Sure. Such legacy-style rankings exist because Google tries not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because the way "importance" on the web was demonstrated in the past (via links and anchor text) is different than the way we're able to demonstrate it today (via social/mentions) doesn't mean some of those old linked-to-with-anchor-text resources are any less important than they once were.
Think of what makes you recognize that something is "important" in your everyday environment. Is it that a number of lower quality references all say exactly the same thing about something? Not really. Things that are important tend to be the focus of a variety of semantic references and sentiments from a variety of high- and low-quality sources and it's that kind of importance, aka authority, that you're trying to replicate in your off-page efforts. Focus on getting people to discuss your product/service rather than just getting webmasters to link to it.
Granted, all the above is a bunch of longer-term strategic gibberish that you can toss out the window if your business tactics and search marketing efforts are focused on the short term. If that's the case, I'd go with "B", but good luck with that.
-
I would go with a higher amount of " exact match" keywords. As long as the content on the page that it leads to is highly relevant. Google is all about serving the best content for the search query. So be sure to make the content that the person is clicking through to extremely relevant to the topic. This now becomes a quality of content and by serving highly relevant content as opposed to working on back links google is going to go where the content is all the time. Also the time that the user spends on the site is taken into consideration.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Looking strategy for Backlinks
Hi, I'm a new bee here, Just wondering if we have some good but easy strategies to get a higher rank in PA and DA?
Link Building | | BeriCollection
My Store URL is [https://bericollection.com].
We are selling Shoes, Watches and smart gadgets.
We do shipping worldwide but need help from the community.0 -
Sudden spike in backlinks - should we disavow?
A kitchen remodelling firm in Australia has noticed a big increase in spammy backlinks to their website since April this year. Majestic shows that referring domains and backlinks during that period have gone up from 400 domains (10,000 links) to 1,070 domains (47,000+ links). About 100 are sitewide links. The vast majority are "follow" links directed at image files on the site - ending in .jpg. Ahrefs now shows the number one anchor text (23%) is a period (full stop) "." Most of the links come from .us domains, eg: cowboysr.us
Link Building | | Adab1
blackphoto.us
alldpic.com Google Search Console isn't showing any of these links, there's no penalty on the site and there's been no noticeable change in rankings (if anything organic clicks went up over May, June, July) ... so we're wondering what action - if any - should be taken. Are these links likely to have a negative impact on the site and homepage? Should we disavow these links? Appreciate any advice. Thanks.0 -
Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!
Link Building | | Turkey0 -
Backlinks through dofollow commenting
I'm interested in building backlinks to my photography business site by leaving good, engaging comments on other photographers' DoFollow blogs. Is this a good idea? Is it worth the effort? Through a little research, I've managed to locate more than 40 dofollow photographer blogs that have a domain authority of 35+. The idea is to take an hour or so a week to leave 10-20 comments on their blog posts. Would you consider this a good strategy? I rank on the first and second page of most of my keywords that I'm working on, but I want to rank 1st or 2nd on them. I used the keyword finder tool on google adwords to find the keywords that are the most searched for in my area. Surprisingly the competition is not large, so I'm fairly comfident I can get there. I've already optimized my site substantially and I'm looking into link building. Thoughts?
Link Building | | studio35design0 -
How to index Backlinks Fast in Google!
I Made few backlinks with my keyword but they are not getting index and it has been for 15 days. Do you have any idea that will help me out to solve this problem and also to index back links quickly.
Link Building | | rohitdeveloper0 -
Adding backlinks in old articles?
I am trying to get a few more links to get a few of my pages to rank and I am thinking about adding some more backlinks on my own site on some of the old blog articles as well as some of my other related blogs. My question is - is it still beneficial to link from these articles that are say 1 year old or more, or would it be far more valuable to write new articles on the blog containing those same links?
Link Building | | bloggingyourpassion0 -
Changing backlinks anchor text
Hi, I've read a few blog post here that suggests the strength of building links using your brand as an anchor text. This supposedly gives the site authority. Currently a chunck of the back links to my homepage are on generic terms i'm trying to rank for which doesn't seem to be working very well. I was thinking of contacting the various webmasters to change the anchor text to that of the site brand name but wondering if this will signal a manipulation of links to the search engines and potentially could be flagged as paid links? Has anybody done this before and what is the danger of doing this? Thanks Duke
Link Building | | clickangel0 -
Building Links to Exact Match Domains
What are the pros and cons having exact match domain and how can you create a brand name and build backlinks? Say we have a domain personalizedbirthdaygifts.com We are quite stuck with what anchor text we need to use and how do we vary it? I've heard that we have to stay away from using commercial keywords as anchor text heavily. We have to also use our brand name. And here we get stuck as we don't have a brand name. In this case Our brand name should be personalized birthday gifts but this is also commercial keyword. I have seen before similar websites droped from ranking because they have commercial keywords in their domain and most of their backlink anchor texts are commercial. If I had a website called twentyfive.com selling birthday gifts it would be a lot easier. But when you have a website personalizedbirthdaygifts.com and trying to rank for personalized birthday gifts and birthday gifts it's tough. OR isn't it? I hope I explained it well and didn't confuse anybody... Thanks
Link Building | | Jvalops0