Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the info. Much appreciated guys.

Duke

Hi Simon,

Many thanks for your answer. The objective is not actually to rank better for the brand term. I thinking along the lines of the link profile and  how many of the achor text used are the brand compared to generic terms that we are trying to rank for. Apparently, there is the move towards rewarding inbound links on brand terms than generic term so the advise to webmasters is to build more links on their brand terms.

Hope this clears my question up.

Best regards

Duke

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

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the comment. Its one of those things that its very hard to establish a cause and effect relationship or a correlation. What i've found is a increase in traffic not only to the home page but to the internal pages as well.

I'm keeping my eye on this to see where it all goes.

I'm not sure if anyone has tested this properly but i'm begining to suspect that google is using site usage statistics as a site quality guide and ultimately as a ranking variable. The this what i've seen so far on one of my sites (site A)

Week 1= bounce rate (83.88%), Avg time on site (0:0:57), Pages/visit (1.28)

no changes made to the site apart from the usual link building.

Week 2:  Traffic drops by 30%, Keywords generating traffic drops by 39%. Bounce rate (87.25%), Avg time on site (0:0:43), pages/visit (1.21). I replaced all affiliate links on my homepage to internal pages where the chunk of the content is and did a reconsideration request.

Week 3: Traffic goes up by 30%, keywords generating traffic goes up by 65%, Bounce rate (30.41%), Avg time on site (0:3:02), Pages/visit (3.74). This is not the most scientific test but surely google must be using these variables and a ranking factor?

Anyone seen something along these lines or have thoughts on it?