Best Anchor Text Practices Post Penguin Panda
-
my question is what are the best practices Post Penguin and Panda for anchor texts? I have heard info about using brand names, and not having duplicate anchor texts. But i'm confused; if its best to have brand names then likely it will end up being duplicate. Also is having no anchor bad? I have also heard that it is best just to use the website URL. It would be great if someone could clear this up for me thanks.
-
Thank you Jared and Chris I appreciate your responses.
-
That's a far better response.
Good intel.
-
Hi Ilya, I replied to another recent question so Im pretty sure I know you're dilemma
From what we are seeing, averaging thresholds where your kw anchor is less than 20%, and then using Brand & URL, as well as others "click here" to fill in the rest. Brand is good I still wouldn't exceed a threshold of 30% on any one keyword. So for example, a company called Sparkling Flooring, we would use Sparkling Flooring no more than 30%, www.sparklinkflooring.com around 30% (but you can go higher with URLs, we just choose not to), and no more than 20% on 'hardwood flooring', etc.
Combined with excellent unique copy, a good information section like a blog or installation tips section, and other good Optimization techniques, and youre golden.
-
I think, based on the bits I've read here and there, that it's more about diversity and quantity than the actual anchor text itself. If you're flooding the web with paid links, and Google sees too much of the exact same anchor text, then that's where you could get into trouble.
My advice would be to mix anchor text up as much as possible. Use a combination of keywords, brand names and URLs and see where that takes you.
I don't know if this is the most educated advice, but I think it's a "safe" way to continue.
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
-
Anchor text after the recent Panda update
Hi everyone, I just read this article: http://goo.gl/GkgUr and I can confirm this is true because one of my websites drastically lost its rank last week due to high percentage of targeted keyword within back links. Thus, what I'm worrying about is the anchor text within back links. I'm about to launch a new web site soon that will be publishing lots of landing pages for a travel niche. What I initially thought is to optimize landing page by page, so when the current page ranks well to move on to next one and so on. I thought that, by ranking a single landing page well, will have some positive impact to the rest of landing pages. But, after a lot of time spent on studying link building strategies, I decided to spread back links among landing pages equally. I will try to get as much as possible back links from the relevant content and high quality sites (press releases, guest posting, link exchange, social networks promotion). Please correct me on this one if you disagree. According to the above article, the recent google panda update calculates a percentage of keywords among anchor text and it would be the best to keep those at less than 30%, including "link", "here", "domain.com" etc. For instance, lets say that my website counts 500 landing pages and every single one targets a different low competition exact keyword. So, if I start building back links equally for each of the landing pages and I want to cover each one with a back link from a relevant content, what should I use for the anchor text? Initially I thought the keyword should be the anchor text, but after I read the article I'm not so sure any more. I guess search engines would say something like: "Ok, there are 500 landing pages and 500 different anchor texts pointing to different pages that belongs to domain.com", perhaps this should increase TLD's authority but what will happen to the landing pages? Would search engines (primarily google) see them as a 100% single anchor text and harm the rank? I really appreciate your help. Thank you!
Link Building | | vlddlv0 -
Lost inbound link from Huffington Post???
My website was featured on HuffPost's "7 Sites You Should Be Wasting Your Time On" in September of 2011 and somewhere along the way it no longer gets recognized as a linking domain? The site/page itself ('7 Sites' from Sept 2011) still exists through direct linking, and my site's link is still on there. I am looking at it right now (still knew the URL because I put it as a link in the 'About' section of my site). Any theories as to how/why this happened and if it is due to something on my end? Any way to get it back?
Link Building | | Pace0 -
A competitor is posting to all these blogs!
One of my competitors is posting on blogs like this getting free back links. http://50fiftyclothing.com/blog1/
Link Building | | CLTMichael
http://www.get-rid-of-bellyfat.org/tag/disease/ http://www.medicalinfo101.com/ He is killing the SERP, but how am I suppose to compete when google is rewarding him with great rankings?0 -
Should you guest post on a site with no quality links?
Suppose a site is related to your industry and has a relatively good domain authority of 49. However when you look at their link profile it is mostly directories and they don't seem to have any natural links from quality sites. Would you still take the link if they offered to publish your guest post?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs1 -
Your Experience with Exact Match Anchor Text Penalties
Hi Moz community! I was wondering if anyone has ever seen a site penalized or dampened because of too many exact match anchor links or know of any examples. I don't want to be overly concerned about it if it is a low risk. Thanks!
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0 -
Links with very bad anchor text!
I have a client with an online shop with auto parts in Romania, on google.ro. The site is quite old but it hasn't good links. The only links (about 700 seen in OSE) the site have are from porn sites/forum/blogs with all kind of obscene words in the anchor text. Those links were placed by competitors, i am sure of that. Now how Google treats those links? Does he know that those links were not placed by any normal human? Does it gives credit to them or doesn't? The site is on a very competitive niche and it is not ranking so good.
Link Building | | maldiniii0 -
Does Anyone Have Evidence of the Effectiveness of Guest Posts?
I think the tactic of guest posts is a good way to earn links to a site. But I have a few concerns: -Links are usually at the very end of the page.
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital
-Guest posts are on blog posts which usually have much less link juice than top level pages.
-A lot of sites abuse guest posting for spammy anchor text, e.g. "cheap auto loans"
-Some SEOs have said that Google will devalue guest post links in the future (due to abuse) Does anyone have examples, tests, or case studies of guest posting helping a site improve their rankings? (or an opinion on the value of guest posting)0 -
Strong pages and subpages: Building exact anchor again and again, or mix up?
Hi Seo Moz Team, I'm looking for some tips to optimize my site. The site is from mid 2009 and I'm targeting a bunch of keywords around a specific topic. One mainkeyword is a two phrase, let's say "keyword one". Since the beginning I built a lot of keyword anchor links with exact "keyword one" to my homepage. The key was climbing week to week until I reached number two on google. This place I could hold for round about 4 month. Until then it was going down to number 18 to number 14. The keyword "keyword one" was used most of all and it is the far most used key in the bunch of the other keywords. My first question is: I don't know what to do. I started building some brand links in order to mix the anchortext up. Should I built some new links to "keyword one" until I'm in the tops again although I have so much of them already? Could it be, that I have a keyword penalty one year now? In the meantime I worked with other keywords, deeplinks with total different keys and brand links. Smaller keys are ranking good and are very stable on positions 1-3. But especially this key is a little bid tricky. Other sites in the serps have roundabout 5-10 links regarding "keyword one" and they are ranking better than my site with 30-40 exakt anchor. My other idea was, that some links with anchor "keyword one" could be devalued. In this case it should be ok to build some new with exact anchor? The second keyword, lets say "key word two" is a three word combination. I have 60 good and editorial links on this special page and mixed up since I was optimizing for this key. Url mentions, exact anchor, variations and so on. With this key I'm on number 3. Number two is a very week site with no exact anchor backlink but a three word "keyword Domain". Regarding to this, my second question: There is no other site on my project, that is stronger than this three key combination page, but I can't reach to number 1-2 in google. The incoming links are very good regarding to all the other sites in the serps. Should I have patience? Building more and more links? I'm afraid that it is unnatural this way. For your information: There is one site in the serps from 2004. Everything this site does is to build lnks with "keyword one" and two other keywords. No variations, no brand. I think 85% of the time. This guy is ranking on positions 2-3 with this combinations since 3 years now, but smaller keys are week and foundable in comparison. Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | Whipeout770