How important are 'anchor' text links now
-
We have started building some good links but I'm just wandering how important anchor based text ones are now.
I'm not talking about spamming/going too heavy but a few here and there.What's your recent experience?
-
Hi,
I have to agree with the previous responses. Anchor text is important because it gives web site visitors (and search engines) a hint about the web page or web site they are about to visit (if they click the link). This is why you DON’T want to use common calls to action like, “click here” or “our website.” Instead, you want to use keyword rich anchor text. But you don't want it to become very spammy sounding—so keep this in mind when creating content.
Anchor text helps search engines understand what the page is about and it also helps establish site architecture. And depending on the anchor text of the link, it might even increase your rankings for certain keywords!
As an example, if you’re having a contest to give away a free website makeover for the HVAC industry, make free HVAC website the anchor text! If thousands of web sites link to your site using the anchor text ‘leading residential furnace installers‘ there’s a good chance that you’re in the residential HVAC business and you install furnaces!
I hope this helped! But if you're looking for more information check out our blog that discusses if you need links to rank on Google.
-
Hi,
Of course its important. But do not abuse.
My experience, not over the 5-6% of links should have exact anchor text.
Other 5-6% brand anchor text, and so on.Hope it helps.
GR. -
Hey,
I would say it comes down to natural usage. If the majority of the links to your site have the same keyword focussed anchor text, it would look unnatural and spammy. But a few links containing your target keywords, as a smaller percentage of the overall anchor text being used is fine, and should support your SEO efforts.
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
-
Spam sites republish a article with 'money keyword' anchor text and causing a pentalty.. how to prevent.
About 6 weeks ago we had a DA50 / PA50 homepage site publish an article on our company which included a money keyword anchor text to our site.. Great. Once this happened we shot up the SERP for this term, but quite a few other spam / crawler sites seem to automatically republish everything this DA50 site publishes. This didnt seem to be a problem up until a couple of weeks ago, but now with the new penguin update it seems we have been slapped with a penalty, for having 20 sites all with the same article and anchor text. (the rest of our profile is pretty natural, so this is the main culprit for the penalty) Im now going to write to all the webmasters apart from the DA50 site, and ask them to remove the article, failing that ill have to disavow them. For future reference what is there a way of avoiding this issue of spam sites republishing a propper article and triggering a penalty.
Link Building | | jpeg800 -
Do spam text links count for negative seo?
I run a high-PR (or whatever we're calling it now) website builder. When you sign up, your URL is a subdomain of the main site (like yourname.foo.com). My site is lucky enough to be on the spammers radar, so they frequently create sites to get more back links. A while back, I caught onto this and neutralized their links (even though they had nofollow tags) by only displaying them as plain text instead of anchor tags. Spammers continue to sign up and create sites, even though their links are now text. My question: Are these text links still affecting my SEO negatively? Or do they know something I don't?
Link Building | | watilo0 -
Ecomerce: Would 4 link sections leak too much link juice?
Hello, In my content management for our ecomerce site, I've found that there are sometimes links to sites in our industry that have "helpful links" sections. Several strong sites link directly to these resource sections. There are 4 different topics that fit this trend in our industry. Would it leak too much link juice to make 4 comprehensive link sections and place a link to them on our "Useful Articles" page? Or should I stick to one comprehensive link section? Or perhaps a small link section? Or none at all? Thanks.
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Penguin Recover: Remove links vs Burry Links
The best is to do both. However with those with limited resources, would building more links with branded and naked URL anchor links be a better solution than painstakingly asking every webmaster to remove links.
Link Building | | reprisemedia10 -
How important are different class c subnets and ip's
We're thinking of launching several blogs in our niche and 'building them up' organically, and then linking naturally from them to our sites (very conservatively). I was wondering if we should buy entirely separate hosting for these blogs and how important are separate ip addresses and class c subnets (shown on majestic SEO tools for instance). Is it possible to create a set of authoritative blogs in a niche and have them be a little 'neighborhood' within the same shared hosting provider (obv similiar class c or even same ip).
Link Building | | ilyaelbert0 -
SEOmoz's ranking of links on competitor question..
I am Perplexed about SEOmoz crawl for new links on a competitors website. When I looked at a company who received very high ranks for the links...on SEOMoz...such as. 95, 96, 97 etc..... I couldn't figure out how they ranked so high. One company bought 20 links for a couple hundred dollars and all of them were ranked very high on SEOmoz but when I used the page rank tool on them individually they were either "0" or "1" and none were over a 2. I was debating submitting for those since I am just starting out and wanted to get our name listed in the internet world. Are the high rankings by SEOmoz related to something else? Would I be better off buying a listing in some of the premium directories instead. Like Yahoo or BBB or Manta. ( After I get my site optimized first) Thank you, Greg
Link Building | | Boodreaux0 -
Anchor text distribution
Hey SEO Mozosphere - Working on a link buying strategy. I know it is wise to target not only anchor text links but also branded text links to keep your anchor text distribution looking natural. However, do you think it would be too risky to ask for branded text links only from low PR sites and focus the more valuable keyword anchor text links on high PR sites?
Link Building | | znotes0