Ranking via partial match
-
If I wanted to rank for "red hot widgets" and my domain was redhot.com, would it be better to obtain backlinks (via "red hot widgets" anchor text) pointing to:
A) redhot.com (homepage)
or
Many thanks.
-
I can't find the perfect quote right now, but I have often read articles were Eric Enge, Matt Cutts and others with a high degree of credibility talked about how unnatural anchor text patterns will likely lead to a (algorithmic) penalty.
Some example articles:
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/anchor-text.shtml
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-061608.shtml
The premise is anchor links are supposed to be independent, and such links will vary naturally if not unduly influenced. When the identical anchor text is used past a certain threshhold, it is clear some extra influence is at work and the links will not have the same value. That influence can include such factors as a widget with specific code, links submitted to 100s of directories, republished articles, standard software created by links, etc.
A natural, independent link has more value then any form of influenced link, and Google does what it can to differentiate them and weight them accordingly.
-
Interesting about redhot.com/red-hot-widgets vs.redhot.com/widgets. So the latter will not be considered a closer match and no problem repeating the KWs red & hot?
Robert, regarding assumption 2, if I was trying to rank for hot dog onions and the domain was hotdog.com would the same still apply?
ie. Is hotdogs.com/hot-dog-onions better than hotdogs.com/onions -- hot dogs & hot dog onions being 2 different products?
-
Thanks for the advice guys.
-
Ryan,
the natural anchor text varies or naturally varying anchor text: Other than appearing unnatural or having readability issues, is there any evidence you have seen as to this having an effect on ranking, etc.? Just curious on this.
-
Based on your question being what you prefer to rank for KW: "red hot widgets" I would say a variant of B would be best. Assumption 1: Redhot is a descriptor of multiple items - widgets, gidgets, and midgets.
Assumption 2: Redhot.com was not a single product or service offering.
The variant I would use is redhot.com/red-hot-widgets; the reason being that I would have the partial KW in the domain and you would have an exact-match KW in the URL.
In a highly competitive widget market, you could go with widgets.redhot.com and grow the subdomain but you will need links, good anchor text and time. You would be growing widgets as its own domain, links, etc.
With a smaller site and the above assumptions, I would go with redhot.com/red-hot-widgets.com.
-
Ideally each page of your site should target one keyword or phrase. Presumably your home page will focus your brand name "Red Hot". Your redhot.com/widgets page will focus "red hot widgets". If this description is accurate for your site, then the backlinks for "red hot widgets" would best applied to your /widgets page.
Keep in mind, natural anchor text varies. It would not be a good idea to have all your links use the same anchor text as it would appear quite unnatural.
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
-
Unexpected Rank Down After Page Update
Hello Team, I have a post on my blog which was ranking on #1 in SERP. I always tried to update it with new content.On 31-Mar-2017, I made a big update in it. Like, it was a list of 20 tips and I made it to 50+. I thought it will help me to increase it's CTR. And, I changed its URL and redirect old one to new one.But when I checked today, it was totally disappeared from SERP 😞 it's nowhere. But it is indexed I have checked but not ranking now. I did this thing (Content Upgrade) before and it always gave good results but I don't know what happened now.Any suggestions or help?Old URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2015/12/21-useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/New URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2017/03/useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/-With love and respect,Puneet Gogia
Technical SEO | | ManAPR0 -
Awful ranking after site redesign
Hello everyone, I have a situation here and I’d like to have your opinion about it. I am working on a site which has been recently redesigned from scratch: in a nutshell, as soon as the new site went live their rankings dropped and, of course, so did their visitors and so on.. The guys who redesigned the site didn’t do any 301 redirect whatsoever, so now the old pages are just 404s and blocked by robots. My question is: if they 301 redirect now, do you think it would be possible they could get their rankings back? One more thing: when they launched the new site, the indexed pages basically doubled overnight; there were 700 and now there are 1400. Do you think this could affect their ranking as well? Thank you for you insights 🙂 Elio
Technical SEO | | Eyah0 -
I don't understand how this site is ranking?
This website is ranking for a very high competitive keyword "bail bonds los angeles" http://www.bondgirlsbailbonds.com/ They maybe have one backlink and 10 citations. How are they ranking for 2nd spot? This doesn't seem possible. Almost 5 other domains on page have pr2 and higher and not able to beat this site. Can someone please explain what might be causing this? thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | webbutler130 -
Sudden drop in rankings
Hi there, I've been working on this site for three or four months (it was a brand new site), and we were seeing some really great improvements in rankings. I've concentrated on writing lots of good quality content and building a network of links through blogging and social networks. Then, last weekend (6th October), we got completely wiped off of the results. We went from rankings 2,3 and 4 for our target terms to not being in the top 100. I assumed we'd been given a penalty from Google as we'd been SEOing too hard and removed a reciprocal links page we had and asked Google to reconsider. I just got a message back saying there hasn't been any manual penalty, so it's just down to the algorithm. I'm running am SEOMoz analysis, but so far it's just coming up with things like page titles too long and too many links on pages, which I can fix, but don't seem like something that would completely destroy us so abruptly. I think we really have the most and best content on the subject of becoming a model, which has taken a great deal of effort to put tgether, so this is crushing. If anybody can shed any light, I'll be extremely grateful, and I'd be interested to knwo if anyone else has experienced anything similar. Thanks in advance! URL: www.modellingadvice. info Kat
Technical SEO | | Katja1230 -
Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice. My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links). Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1. Here are some more details: I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected. The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time. site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
Technical SEO | | grojoh
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+ No malware on website I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones). I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty. It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!? I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com. What do you think about it and what shall I do? Thank you so much for any help!0 -
Photography site still not ranking well after over year
I have a photography business In the Orlando Fl market. I have noticed my site: joeyvalyphotography.com Does not rank even In the top 50, for my strongest keyword: Orlando Wedding Photographer However, the keyword Orlando engagement Photography/photographer Ranks Very well, and has been rising I'm rank very rapidly over the last two weeks. I'm not sure why my main keyword is not going anywhere, and what my next move should be. I'm considering spending few fhousand dollars on a n seo company, however I though I could learn how to improve my keyword ranking on my own to no avail. Any and all tips, suggestions, advice, will be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | gaji0 -
PR Ranks
Do they really have a lot of value on how a site performs on Google? What is the best way to raise your PR Rank?
Technical SEO | | CalgaryRealtor390 -
How do 301 redirects affect rankings?
Scenario: example.com/red-shoes gets 301 redirected to example.com/brown-boots because we have stopped selling red shoes and now only sell brown boots (which is a fairly new page with no authority). the red-shoes page ranked well for "red shoes" and "footwear". Will Google still index and show the red-shoes url in the SERPs? Will the "red shoes" and "footwear" keywords still rank well? Or does the redirected/new boots page need to properly support these keywords? The boots page has inherited the juice from the shoes page, but how does it help the boots page rank well? Only for keywords that both pages targeted, like a general "footwear" type keyword? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | akim260