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In general, if you are writing about information that is commonly available on many websites, then that information can be considered to be "common industry knowledge" - and most authors would not use citations.   Facts that would likely be in the body content of an introductory college textbook would also be considered as "common industry knowledge".

However, if you are stating specific information that might only be available from one or a few sources, then a citation is a proper thing to do.  Also, if you are giving facts or advice that you feel it is important to give others credit or responsibility, citations are good there too.

The above is what I generally do for writing content for a specific industry.  I also tend to use more citations where parts of my writing approach the limits of my firmly confident knowledge.

You are obviously doing research and visiting sites that you think would be superior to your own.  What is their practice on citations?  That might be a guide for you too.

Read Will Critchlow's blog post from Monday...

https://moz.com/blog/can-you-guess-which-page-ranks-better

It depends on the quality of their page, how people engage it, how they share it, etc.

Poor quality pages on powerful websites can rank poorly.  Great pages on nascent websites can rank well, although they would likely rank better on a powerful website.

Put it on a page and toss it up.   See what happens.

Keywords on websites are not what performs.   Instead it is content on websites that determines performance.

Get someone to post yada yada yada about a subject and I'll write a good article and we will see which performs better.  Which do you think?

So the secret sauce is not all about the website.  Its more about the content and the panache of the person who creates it.

And, although you can use a lot of metrics, those are mostly for entertainment.  The real rocket fuel is how your visitors will engage, share, tweet, like, and link the PAGE.  Google ranks pages and not websites.

This isn't an answer or advice.  It is simply my way of thinking.

I don't use social.  We have a website with a lot of traffic and only three people to work on it.  That website is mainly monetized  by ads.

So, should we work on that website and produce content for those thousands of people per day or should we engage people one-on-one on social media?  I think that I should be working for those thousands of people per day, sometimes thousands per hour who visit our website.  Take care of them there, be the best you can be, don't take your eye off of the ball if you are good at your game.

If I write an article and post it on my site it will be engaged by dozens or hundreds or thousands of people every day, every day, every day for years.   Even after I am  dead it will make money for my kids.  If I spend time on social media those posts or comments or whatever disappear or become stale a short time later.  I like spending my time on an investment, not frittering it away.

We can't monetize content that we put on social media, but we can monetize content on our website.  So, why should I build content on social.  Why should I even go there?  The only answer that I can find is if I enjoy social media (which I don't).  I do post on Moz because I enjoy the people and learn from them and that is why I post here - because there is something in it for me.  I am not looking for that on social. I have enough ways to spend my time.

Service providers are always calling me because they want to help me with social.  I think that they are social evangelists who are trying to make money by telling you what you should be doing when they don't know anything about your business or your personality or your resources.  They are only trying to hustle your money.   I don't think that most of them are making a positive return for their clients.  That's just my guess and opinion.

I don't want to participate in social and that is my attitude because I would rather produce content - which makes me good money and so far has been successful.  With that bad attitude about social I think that I would really suck at it and I am right to tell these evangelists "don't bother me".  Instead,  I should do what I like, be happy while I do it, and don't blow money on social because I don't think that money will get a positive return.

If the domain being moved has pages with good content that are ranking, the content of those pages should be moved to the new domain.  That will help preserve traffic that comes into those pages.  Get these pages ready, but don't publish they until you are ready to make the switch.

The hosting for the domain being moved should be kept permanently.  You can reduce the plan to low traffic levels but it needs to be there with your redirects.  If you abandon it then any traffic that clicks through links will not be redirected and the value of links pointing to the domain will be lost.

If there are links on other sites that you can have edited to their new destination, contact those webmasters after the redirect has been made.

Starting soon, before the switch. Place notices that click to short announcements on the domain being moved telling customers about the switch.  That will hold current customers and not surprise them when the switch occurs.

After the switch, the links to the domain that was moved will now point to the combined domain.  If these sites have different link sources then they will be combined in the new domain.  If the domain being moved had lots of different links that the domain being moved to that will give maximum benefit.  If they duplicate one another's links then the benefit will be very small.

You can notify google of the redirect in your search console.

There are many fine points of redirecting that might not be covered above.  If you have not done this before it would be wise to have an experience SEO help you plan and execute the move.  That way all of the things that you do will be checked and they will watch to be sure that nothing is missed.  I am not saying this because I am looking for work.  I don't do work for others.  I only work on my own sites.  I am saying this because its a smart thing to do if you don't have a bit of experience with moving domains.

I would publish unique descriptions.  The advantage of unique descriptions is that you are not one of many with the same content in the SERPs.  Your pages will have more unique keywords for long tail reach beyond your competitors, and your pages will not be filtered from the SERPs because you arrived late with a weak site displaying the exact same content as others.  You are entering a competitive environment.  Compete or die.

I wouldn't hire students.  I would hire a couple people who have university degrees in English with an emphasis in literature and who have earned excellent grades.  These are folks who know books, have bought lots of them, are familiar with their commercial descriptions and can write freely and easily with proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.  The competing salaries are not as high as other employees.  They will cost more than a rocks-for-jocks sophomore who is about to drop out, but they are definitely worth the extra money for the quality and productivity that comes with them.

I would tell them to start by picking books that they are already familiar with and write some sample descriptions.  Before they start writing I would have them use SEMrush on the title of the book and get some sample keywords of what people with commercial intent might include in a query.

After that, I would have them focus on books that are not best sellers - too much competition there.  They would also focus on higher price books with search volume - more profit there.

Don't try to save money by attacking with a rubber sword.  You know what will happen.

Everything that I believe about SEO tells me that a big and diverse photography site will perform better than two little photography sites.  So I would offer multiple photography services on the same domain.

I don't think that a person who shoots photos at weddings is going to be a total bozo about shooting photos of houses or offices.  Great photographers are great photographers and their body of knowledge is versatile and transferable to different subjects.

Also, I think that a person who lands on a website about photography and is given choices for weddings, real estate, product, and other types of photography is going to think that they should leave right away.  They might find respect in the individual or the team that offers these many services.

I think that for every customer that you lose because he thinks that you can't do more than one type of photography, you will gain a customer who gets wedding photos done and then comes back for more good work related to real estate.  Lots of people who are getting married are also going to be in the process of selling a home.   They hopefully will not be hiring you for another wedding any time soon.  Repeat customers are easier sells than a potential customer who knows nothing about you.

This is just wildassguessing... When you metrics are overwhelming, and your content is greatly superior by formal industry standards... but these little cottage industry sites with informal content and a tribe of visitors are beating you.... your best prayer of getting to the top is to be patient and allow Google to observe that your visitor metrics put enough weight on the scale to make your site more credible.

Google will believe rubbish for a while but strong truth can still prevail.

I've had some keywords that I thought my site would shoot right to the top upon publishing a new page.  Why?  The competition was sleepy little sites that didn't use formal language, had lots of inaccurate and pseudo-information.  I thought that my site would roll right over them.  However, my site didn't make the top 50.  Six months later, still not in the top 50.  So, I take a close look and my bet was that the presence of informal, inaccurate, pseudocrap was probably what the masses of people were searching for.   I refused to put that stuff on my site - even in criticism - and now, after well over a year, some of my pages in this niche are starting to break into the top 10 and pull a little traffic.

So, you can have weak competitors, even BS competitors, but if they got the language of the niche and a tribe of searchers and visitors behind them, you might have trouble winning even if your metrics are overwhelming.

I don't believe that it "hurts" to put up a temporary site.  However, if it subtracts from your time of getting your real site up then that is a sacrifice.

I would rather put up the first few pages of my real site a day or two early than get a temporary site up a week before.

The only exception is that I would want something up ASAP if I knew that important people were looking for me.

Google might have lifted a manual penalty but algorithmic penalties are still holding the site back.

It is possible that Panda (low quality content) or Penguin (link spam) penalties are causing the current problem.  Numerous DMCA complaints or other infractions could have gotten the site banned.

A link audit or content audit might reveal the cause.

Each one of these article pages has links and house ads on it that guide visitors to pages where the product and accessories can be purchased.  These customer service pages appear in the SERPs, pull traffic and are a source of the sales that show up in our shopping cart.

We also link to these pages from sales pages.  Some people would not do this because they think it is distracting, however, we know that people who land on our sales pages often follow these links.  On our site, the average person has a 13 day gap between their first visit to our site and the first purchase being made, so we think that these links on product pages give them confidence in us as a vendor and also answers any questions that they have about the product.

It sounds like there is a lot of potential for you.

We have two types of sites, info sites with small stores and retail sites with large content libraries.

For the retail sites, our first source of articles is questions that we receive from our customers.  These are articles about how to select the right model, features, size, etc.....  how to make common repairs.... examples of how to use the products.   We used customer emails as starters for these articles and beefed them up to a formal article that included lots of photos, tables, video, etc.

You might be able to get people in customer service to write these articles.  Tell them that is a really important job.  If they get the same question over and over and over, then having an faq page on the site that links to these customer service articles will allow people to get their answers in a self-service mode instead of bugging your staff.

Make your site the one that has more of this type of content than all of your competitors combined.

We don't do linkbuilding for any of our sites.  Instead we put all of our work into creating content.

If you are producing industry-leading content, have decent traffic already, and you have visitors who appreciate and spread the word about your content for you then this is a good strategy.

This is not a good strategy if your content is low quality or even medium quality because nobody is going to spread the word about it or link to it.  And, you gotta be honest with yourself about this... don't think that because you wrote an article that you have a good one.  You must compare it to the websites that hold the top positions in the SERPs and ask if yours is as good or better.

Someone might argue that if we added a linkbuilding service that we would do even better.  That might be true.   But instead of doing that I would rather pay someone to take over other duties and keep myself and my content team focused on more content and better content.

I can't figure out if they are really that ignorant of the rules or if they are just lying.

Probably both!  And, they say anything that makes the best story to gain a client, hold a client or make themselves look innocent when things go wrong.

**We have competitors who are using very shady SEO tactics and winning with them. **

I think that it is more Google being slow to identify problems and conservative about what they penalize.  When SEOs go into the manuipulative zone they are taking their chances that Google will not find them or penalize them.   SEOs who do this often do not fully inform the client that risks are being taken and that they could be slapped with a penalty that will permanently ban them from google, or in the case of Penguin, have their site demoted in the SERPs for nearly two years.

Robots directives and rel=canonical can be assigned by .htaccess.  This is a very handy way to assign noindex or rel=canonical to .pdf documents, print formats, video transcripts, etc.  You can also use it to apply noindex or rel=canonical at scale.   Two  Moz articles (of several) that describe these are....

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

https://moz.com/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos

Just a personal belief.... the strongest signal that Google can get is when people are asking for you by name - in the search box or in the address window of Chrome.

Google is really smart about manipulation. They have teams of PhD engineers looking out for it and racks of servers watching for it.  These guys are so into it that they don't go home at night.  And, the guys who offer these clicking services are not very smart.  If they were smart they would be making big bucks in cushy jobs like Google Engineer and riding hoverboards around their offices.   The intersection between really smart people and really dumb people isn't a good place to get involved.

OK... take your chances.  Thousands of people are still being flogged by Penguin after two years.

If you wait until you get a penalty for bad links you have a huge problem.

Current people suffering from Penguin have been under a penalty for TWO YEARS.

This happens with my sites for many keywords.  When I see it, I spend a few moments go give thanks and then I get right back to work.

**I would test this theory by picking a few of the random pages and adding some content that is well optimized and see how it performs. **

Great suggestion, Brian.

Put some real work into a few of these pages and see what happens.

My bet is that Google sees these as low quality pages because there is not much text content beyond a quote and that same quote can be found on lots of other websites.  Google is looking to promote pages that have unique and substantive content that does not already exist on hundreds to thousands of other websites.

Although other websites are in the SERPs with simply a quote and some supplemental content, they claimed that turf first, are now well established sites.  Newcomers who enter these SERPs without unique and substantive content are going to be placed in the supplemental results or filtered from the SERPs.

Turf in the SERPs has become really hard to get.  You will have to do more for these pages to be successful.

If they crawl the article again, and notice that the anchor text has changed, then it could put up a red flag.

Yes, indeed.  I agree with Bernadette.

Every site should have some anchor text diversity.  It keeps you from looking like you are trying to manipulate the search engines.  This particular anchor text, which is not exactly what you want, could actually be extremely beneficial if lots of your other links have highly optimized anchor text.

I would not tweak this link.  Google is watching.

If I had 17,000 new product pages and the content was excellent I would upload them and link them into the website as fast as possible.  They I would be excited about getting more sales.

If the content is thin, has a cookie-cutter format, or if the product descriptions are duplicated from a feed or found elsewhere on the web I would be scared about getting a Panda problem.   So, I would write new, unique and substantive descriptions before they are uploaded.

I would view 17000 new product pages as an important opportunity and get them written promptly without sacrificing quality.

As a last alternative, I would use skinny content, but noindex these new pages and remove the noindex as the content is upgraded.

Where does your client fall in the chain of command of the company? If s/he is at the very top, sunk costs should not dictate keeping a bad website, and if something different is better for this one product then it is better for all of the products.

Linda makes a really good point here.   The website is not liked, then it should be fixed.  This is an opportunity for the staff to learn what the "company"   "thinks" the site should be or for the boss to admit that lax management allowed the project to jump the tracks.  Learn, improve, move upwards.

We have redone lots of work here.  Sometimes because it was my fault.  Sometimes because we learned something.  When those jobs were redone it was a really good day.  

Sounds like the designers run the company.

My client really dislikes their brand website,

Make a new brand site that the client will love.  Right now an ugly brand site is making the client run to a subdomain, which we know is not the best move.

I'd really like to see keyword tracking available for subfolders.  How many of our efforts are based around product lines, articles in a topic niche, articles of a single author.

A couple of decades ago, I burned out multiple computers running a log analysis  program named ClickTracks because it tracked the performance of my folders, but the program was costly and became unsupported and when your last computer died that could run it, your ability to use it was gone for good.

If you think that "conversions" is the main work that needs to be done then you can tell them that the current copy is great for this and that... but we think that a few changes will help it convert better.  Give some examples.

If the site has lots of traffic you might be able to see an obvious lift or if you have the ability to do A/B test, measure any conversion change that occurs.   If the site doesn't have a lot of traffic or you don't have the ability to do A/B testing will be a little harder to prove, but you might compare conversions per hundred visits this month vs. last month.

what is making you think it is so bad?

I agree.  And, what do you think is so bad about it?

• Is it simply lots of errors in grammar and punctuation?
• Is it errors in the basic content?
• Is it that the structure needs changed to make the points better?
• Is it badly presented for conversions?
• Is it lacking in SEO elements?

Each one of these requires a different expertise to repair.... proofreader/grammarian, content expert, editor, conversion rate optimizer, SEO.

Lots of people really really hate to write and when they are told your writing sucks they don't like it.  They are offended or they don't want to invest more.  If they are an industry expert with a lot of experience selling in their business niche then you are really putting your nose into it.

So, before you can do a good job of improving their work you must identify the types of problems present and realize that each type of problem (and there may be more than one) requires a different approach to solve - some of which might be more palatable to your client.

And reading between the lines, my guess is you are saying yes, this matters a great deal - elsewise you wouldn't want to be advising lots of analysis before action.  Am i right?

You are right.

At a high level, would blocking that old stuff (no index, yes follow) effectively refocus linkjuce on product pages?

I believe that linkjuice will still flow through these pages.  Is that correct?  Maybe, it depends upon how search engines have decided to process the flow of linkjuice through noindexed pages that are followed... and search engines can decide however they want and change their minds about it without announcement or regard.

So the question remains: will selectively noindexing large quantities of old poor-quality stuff help the relatively smaller quantities of product related stuff in Google's ranking algorhitm?

I don't know the answer to that question because I don't know how search engines handle the noindex.  If this was my site, I would be redirecting to remove those pages from the index and push the value of any links to a relevant page on the website - if there is one.

Here is what I have done on a similar situation....

One one of my sites we were posting about six to ten very short news items per day.  This was a news blog that covered emerging topics in our industry and related industries.  They would get a lot of traffic  for a few days and a few of them would attract a nice amount of traffic long term.  We would allow them to remain in the blog archive until the first day of January, two years after they were posted.  We would then redirect all of them as a group to the homepage of the news section of the website and delete them from the server.  Before the redirect was done we would consider any of the posts that were still drawing traffic and write extended articles for those that were of merit.

We continue the news blog because.... lots of other industry related websites link to the homepage of the news section, lots of people have it book marked, it ranks well in search and gets thousands of views per day.

But the main reason we keep it...  lots of visitors type our domain into the address window of their broswer or into a search box, land on our homepage and click "news".   Google sees this activity because they are the most important search engine and they own the most important browser.  Google sees thousands of people asking for our website by name.  That in my opinion, is extremely important to the rankings of my website that people ask for us by name and Google sees it.  So, if you have this it could be worth more than gold.

Google does not update these features very often.  We moved some content to another website in February and some of these features are still showing in the SERPs for the old location.

However, we placed 301 redirects on the original pages so that this traffic from Google, existing links from other websites, bookmarks from past customers and many other types of traffic will be redirected to the new destination.

We always put up 301 redirects anytime we move anything and they will be there forever - even after my funeral - and my business continuity plan instructs my heirs to keep these 301s in place.  I believe that holding these 301s in place beyond my lifetime is best practice (I am a lot older than most Moz fans).

This is a very important question and you don't want to steer this decision using "shoot from the hip" answers or kibitzing.

I believe that a good answer to this question would require a person to become very very familiar with these 5000 blog posts, the links that flow into them, the amounts of traffic that they receive, their content quality and their search engine health.

If suddenly some 99% of a 5,000 page blog is changed to have the blog pages no-indexed, will the linkjuice be now more concentrated on the remaining 1%?

This is an extremely drastic move.  There might be better ways to accomplish your goal of using the power of these pages to drive linkjuice.  However, linkjuice is not the single factor here.  Traffic, navigation structure, keyword reach of the site and many other things could be more important.

I don't want to give any specific advice because a well considered answer is what you need and I am unable to provide it.  I don't think that anyone can given the information provided and without being extremely familiar with your website.

When I have made this type of decision with my own site (that I know extremely well from working on it every day for many years) I usually study on it for weeks, looking at traffic, conversions, content investment and more, then obtained second opinions to give me strength or weakness about making the move.

This is not a decision that is easy to make.  Quick answers given here are going to come with risks.

Nothing is guaranteed when you move domains.  I see the following risks....

we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn

Yikes!  New content might not be received as enthusiastically by the search engines.  It might not be received as enthusiastically by visitors and they will bounce - sending a bad signal to search engines.  If this was my site I would keep the content and the internal linking among the pages the exact same as it is now.  If the rewrite is not done in a way that preserves the visitor's pleasure your rankings might fall.

These original sites... if they are popular and have a lot of type in traffic, a lot of branded traffic, a lot of brand mentions, a lot of domain mentions, a lot of good will, a lot of navigational search, then you will be walking away from that.  Rankings can be supported more by these signals than by links in many cases.  No guarantees.

We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own

I believe that (generally) best SEO practice is done when the strongest domain becomes the host of the content.  It then has the ability to pass its authority and reputation into the content being moved there.

**What is the health of these other domains? **

If you can't say that these other sites have clean link profiles, healthy content profiles, etc. then merging them could have some risk.  It might pay to check these things out before merging.  You know the story about "one bad apple."

Will this help the sites that receive the content?    Yes.  They will acquire content that they can display to their visitors.  That content should appear in the search engines and pull in traffic.  The 301s will redirect links that might help rankings and deliver click-through traffic.

Will the content rank in the search engines as well on the new sites as it did on the old sites?  Maybe better, maybe worse, probably not the same.  When you move content from Site A to Site B, that content loses the domain authority that it enjoyed on Site A.  If Site A is powerful, authoritative and topically relevant to the moved content and Site B is not, then lower rankings in the search engines for the content on Site B would be expected.  If Site B is more powerful, authoritative and topically relevant then rankings might be higher there,  Maybe.  No guarantees.

The value of the redirected links is questionable.  The links into the content on Site A that will be redirected.  If they duplicate the domains or pages of the links already hitting Site B then the lift that they will give to Site B will be minimal.  However, if they are all uniquely new to Site B then their lift should be positive.

Finally, will moving all of this content damage Site A?   Yes.  This is cutting out body parts similar to arms and organs.  When this content leaves the traffic flow into Site A will drop.  The number of linking domains and pages will drop.  The offer of this content to entertain existing visitors will be gone.  The size of that loss will determine the impact.  Rankings of remaining content might fall if the loss is great.    If arms and legs or heart or brain are extracted then expect Site A to suffer.  But if lesser things are lost then the damage will be lower but some damage will happen.  Search engines and visitors will all notice.  Enthusiastic visitors will find the content in its new home and they might move with it.

Content moves from one site to another happen often.  Sometimes the content is moved for strategic purposes, sometimes tactical purposes, sometimes it is sold for a nice price.  There are many reasons.  The alternative to the 301 is the rel=canonical.  Each has its advantages, risks and shortcomings.  The rel=canonical allows Site A to continue to use the content but any ranking value supposedly transfers to Site B.  How much?  Only the search engines know how they process that.  My experience with rel=canonical is that it is valuable to consolidate the power of content that appears in multiple places on a single site.  I don't see it sending a lot of value from one domain to another.  Just an observation.  I don't know of anyone who has written the results of carefully controlled experiments.

Continuity plans often contain information that remains private until needed.

Matt Cutts did a video in March 2014 that talks about this type of situation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tz7Eexwp_A

If these pages have good and substantive content then toss them up immediately.  Time is money, get them up there.

If these pages have thin and trivial content then don't publish them until you have something good.

*By the way - all these URLs were already indexed in the past, but then redirected.

Why were they redirected?  What makes them bad pages then and good pages today???

I understand with a 301 redirect, the final URL would have lost about 15% of the link juice.

It used to be that 301 redirects resulted in a loss of linkjuice.  That is no longer true, as stated by John Mueller of Google, and Gary Illyes.  https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

However - if after some time (e.g. 2 months, or 1 year) I remove the redirection - is the original page going to have any SEO juice, or did it already lose all of it?

ALL of my 301 redirects will still in place when I am dead.  My continuity plan passed on to my heirs tells them that they better keep all of the 301s in place or face a possible substantial loss of income.  If you remove the 301 you have no guarantee that linkjuice will still fllow.... but you do have a guarantee that any human who clicks that link will find air.

In your situation...  with these URLs being previously redirected... I would simply remove the redirect and use the current page.  It might take Google a long time to reindex them unless you submit each of them for indexing.   I would try that with a few and see if Google accepts them, indexes them and returns them to a reasonable ranking.

Thanks for sharing your opinions on these.

I agree.

Mike's message reminds me of how specific an EMD can be.  CheapQualityLaptops.com and EgolsLaptops.com are examples.

I would not go that far.   My ideas of an EMD are root category names such as Laptops.com, Widgets.com, CoffeeMakers.com.

This is a matter of opinion, I think.  So, this post is simply what I do and what I think..

All of my important sites are on EMDs.  Some of them cost a bit of money.  I just acquired my latest one about a month ago.   I believe that EMDs are easy for people to remember.  They lack hyphens and hard to spell words.  If they match your industry or product line then I believe that they enable a better conversion rate and give credibility (others will really disagree with that - but I believe that is the EMD envy in them saying that because they want to get any domain that they want for $12 and really begrudge paying more - especially when the previous owner is not running a site on that domain).   Final words... be sure to get a .com or the most common TLD in your country.

EMDs used to have a strong ranking benefit.  That is no longer true.  I believe that the ranking benefit is tiny at the moment.  The EMD envy people will tell you that the ranking benefit of an EMD domain is negative, but they are deluded on this too.

If you write to me and say... hey.. would you consider adding my new article to your news feed.  I would look at it and add it, only if it was outfreekingstanding and highly relevant to my audience.

However, if you write to me and say that you want specific anchor text, then I am going to delete your message and all future messages, I don't care if the Pope is writing for your site.  Why?  Because you are trying to manipulate the search engines and I don't want to have anything to do with your site because I don't want to be linking to anything that Google will count as spam.

I think you want me to give a palatable answer.

If you ask for the anchor text it is manipulative.  If the person with the website determines the anchor text then it was not manipulated by you.

That method is manipulative.  The anchor text is being placed to manipulate the search engines.

And, if you get a high number of keyword rich anchor text links you might have a Penguin problem.

These are descriptions of manipulative links based upon anchor text that are quotes straight from Google (here).....

" Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links."

"Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites."

There are many other types of manipulative links based upon anchor text.

Although it appears that spam-made links with keywords as anchor text links are an effective way to drive, if you have a lot of those types of link your website will stand out to Google's algos and you could get a Penguin problem.  Lots of people who have Penguin problems have lost their rankings for about two years.  Google keeps saying... "we are going to run the Penguin update soon" and the owners of these sites have been tormented by the numerous and lengthy delays.