Question, Directory Listing Text Best Practices

[brandon.grass]

I have been doing some reading on directory link anchor text and it appears the best practice for 2018 and beyond would be to build your brand. For Example Sue's Shoes and her website is shoesbysue.com

Directory Anchor Text As Follows

shoesbysue.com
http://wwwshoesbysue.com
Sue's Shoes

Now my question would be if you had a competitor site who was top position on google and ALL anchor text for all directories at leat 90% was

Buy Shoes Here

I do not understand how they are following best practices? What do you recommend to be safe.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Just bare links and natural links go to your homepage and give it power.  Then links from your homepage to other pages on the site contain the anchor text that tells google what the page is about.  Also sometimes external places will link to particular pages inside your website (deep linking) with anchor text or not.  Better with but it's becoming less and less important as time goes by.  I don't think we'll all be talking about anchor text or maybe not even about links at all in a few years time.

Some of my best pages are ranking number one nationally (for the whole of the UK) and they are super-high competition and they don't have one single backlink.  That must tell you something...

Likewise some of my pages I've done 'linkbuilding campaigns' and spent weeks and months building links to and it's not made a blind bit of difference.

Please remember to mark the answer as a good one if you like it. Helps me get recognition for helping out. And feel free to ask more questions.  I only started learning SEO in May 2017 and my site back then had 900 users a month.  Since then I wrote and optimised about 60 pages and we now get 32,000 users a month and our business has tripled in size.  Linking was the last thing on my mind.  Writing good content came first.  And proving to google that we are who we say we are with links from universities and professional bodies for the dentists.  those are the real power links.  You must have suppliers who will link to you in their 'find a distributer' sections?

[brandon.grass]

Hi Ed

Greatly appreciate the response and help THANKS, I have checked both those links working on the 50 list as we speak. While you made a great point, these are all relatively new links my competitor has added in the recent weeks to months. I read a great article on how you want to use anchor text for your brand first and foremost with less than 10% anchor text to be about the specific topic of the page. But what you said makes sense how does Google know that content is about that specific topic if the only anchor text is on your brand name?

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Anchor Text is only one of the many ways google understands what a page is about.  And links are only one of the many ways google verifies a domains authority to rank it.

Be careful of modelling your 'top competitors' because they may have been doing SEO on the site fr 10 years which means they may have all these dodgy "exact match" anchor texts and even dodgier domain listings.

You only need national, local and hyperlocal citations for your business.  The practice of adding it to web directories is hopelessly out of date and worth nothing.  You're more likely to get a penalty.

Google have said that you may use exact match internal anchor text liberally but if you start using exact match EXTERNAL anchor text (i.e links from other sites) then you'll get an algorithmic penalty or even a manual action.

Take a look here to get your first 50 links, here for some link strategies that will help your site and are up to date and STAY OFF THE DIRECTORIES.  I answered a directories question the other day so it should be available in the search.  We've done soem tests on using directories and it really, really doesn't work. Be aware this is not the same as the ESSENTIAL practice of 'citation building'

As for anchor text you have to make it look natural and mix it up.  But just using bare URL's and the name of your site will work for now while you're building your brand.  But blindly following the 'big players' out of date tactics can be suicide.  All their dodgy links will still be there it's just that google will have updated and discounted them.  But if you start getting bad links and over-optimising anchor text when that is known bad practice then you'll get stung.

Hope this helps. Please remember to mark it helpful if it's helped!