Link building when your domain name is your head term.

[Zachary_Russell]

Hello,

I am working with a company that their domain name is the same as the head term. For example, if I was going for the head term coffee, and my site was coffee.com. This is specifically in the medical space, and i'm competing directly with Web MD and The Mayo Clinic, my advantage on the term is the EMD.

We have a legitimate site with thousands of pages of relevant content, and I am starting a guest blogging campaign on relevant health sites. My real challenge is when I go for anchor text links should I ideally go for [head term] or [headterm.com] as the anchor text.

Thanks in advance for your insights

Zach

[irvingw]

you should be concerned, because your main keyword is also your domain name so you can get penalized for over optimization even if you are going for relevant links.

If you are coffee.com get people to link to you with "www.coffee.com" "http://www.coffee.com" and "coffee.com" as well as other variations. Too many instances of "coffee" and you could get hit with an over optimization penalty since your domain name is coffee and that is one more major factor where they keyword is linking up perfectly.

[Marcus_Miller]

I have worked with two companies that picked up penguin penalties for the site / business name and it matched the URL.

For the purpose of an example:

www.Green-Widgets.com

They had lots of exact match links for:

Green Widgets

And very little for www.green-widgets.com / green-widgets.com / http://green-widgets.com etc.

Now, in an effort to clean this up we removed lots of sitewide links for the 'Green Widgets' keyword and they pretty much regained the ranking for that one keyword (2nd place I believe).

Now, this site had a network of other sites that linked to it with sitewide links with the keyword so they had really gone at it in an aggressive fashion.

So, if you are doing this, then as mentioned here, I would mix it up a bit. You are highly unlikely to pick up a penalty from single links obtained on quality sites via guest blogging but I would still go 50% keyword, 50% domain to be on the safe side.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[William.Lau]

There will be slightly more value to your headterm than headterm.com. I suggest you mix it up or just use headterm.com.

It won't matter if sites are all authoritative because you can still be penalized if there is an abundant amount of anchor text with your head term.

[askshopper]

Targeting the keyword is fine just be sure to add some diversity to your links, do not just do one keyword, add some phrases e.c.t even if they contain it.

[Zachary_Russell]

I'm not worried about being penalized, as I am only going for relevant links, no spam whatsoever. I'm just wondering if there'd be more value passed through using the keyword rather than the domain.

Thanks

Zach

[PeterM22]

You should be ok using the head term, but I have seen a couple of instances where sites have been penalized for this. To be extra safe, you could use the keyword.com