Over optimization of Anchor Text | Consequences, Guidelines, Precautions
-
Hi everyone. I am really worried because of the constant penguin and panda algorithms. I hired two or three SEO agencies and they did some link building for my pages a while ago. And just this time, our rankings dropped almost sitewide some 7-8 positions. I checked our link profile in this site , and we do not seem to have spammy links. I admit that we do have some low link quality, such as directories, blog posts, etc. And it seems to have 10-15 links with overoptimized anchor text, such as keyword exact anchor text, etc.
I have a couple of questions regarding this matter?
- - What entitles an overoptimized anchor text? I mean, i can´t control people linking to me out there, and many of them used the product or brand name. Added to the fact that my former agency used article marketing links with exact keyword.
- - If i "overoptimized" my anchor text, what is the best solution?, I could change some anchor text by asking some people. Should i disavow, delete? What is your best bet here?
- - What is (May 27 2013) best practice for anchor text or link referall. I know it will keep changing, but i want to engage in the right practice right now. should link with www.domain.com/keywordpage.html, or how would one look natural?
- -I saw some recent links that are really strange to me. Could the competition be sending me some bad links in order to augment the situation. Is that something normal?, it sounds strange to me.
Thanks for your valuable advice. I know many people are frustrated with these penalties and hits. Because there are still many sites with Mass EMDs, 3-page content, flash sites, that are ranking better than a high quality and engaging one. Any resource is more than welcome to recover from these dropped rankings.
Regards,
-
I too find it very helpful for all my sites.
Thanks Michael for your help,
Regards,
Sophie
-
Great! Thank you very much for the thorough explanation.
Best Regards!
-
Deleting is generally preferable, but often harder. Short-term, you might disavow so that if Bing isn't penalizing you for those links, they still get counted there. If you run into a manual penalty, Google's spam team will want to see serious effort AND results of trying to get links taken down.
Really depends on the quality of the site. If it's a spammy site, then disavow/delete. If it's not a terrible site, then try to change the anchor text so you retain the link.
-
Great! Thanks for the excellent advice! I will engage on a strategy to mitigate the effects of over-optimizing anchor text.
One last question, What is the main difference between deleting links and disavowing ? Would you try to convince to website owners that link to you on changing some anchor text , or just balance them out with links with site url or and brand name?
Thanks again!
-
First off, I'd get rid of all of the article marketing links. Disavow those domains right away. If you get a manual penalty, you will not get the penalty removed if there are still examples of article marketing out there.
While you cannot control how people link to you, you should expect the vast majority of people who link to you without being coerced by you to link with your domain name or your brand name.
It's hard to know precisely what % of anchor text can be keyword-targeted, especially as an updated Penguin algo came out just a few days ago, making studies older than that come under question :-). But there's a great post here from last year that you should read, where it would appear that you'd be ok keeping your optimized anchor text links at 25% or less (which I would agree with).
But to see if you ARE suffering from a Penguin penalty for over-optimized anchor text, spend a little time in Google Analytics, drilling down into the organic search area, and look at your top 5 or 10 keywords, and see if traffic from those took a hit around one of the Penguin updates. Chartelligence is a really nice Chrome plugin that can help with this.
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
-
Having some problems with understanding how to properly use anchor text for my keywords' better rankings. Please help!
Hello, Last week I did some work on my website's inner pages linking and some of my highly ranking keywords fell down as a result. I guess I did something wrong, please help me figure out what exactly was wrong! Here is the example of what I did. I put a link to the page that ranks for 'Thermador repair Brentwood' here: http://www.ifixappliancesla.com/blog/2016/09/12/appliance-repair-brentwood/ I put exactly same anchor text, 'Thermador repair Brentwood'. For my blog posts, I use Yoast plugin, so when adding the link, I received the message "You are linking to another page with the focus word you want this page rank for. Consider changing that if you truly want this page to rank." While this one's ranking, 'Thermador repair Brentwood', didn't fall down, others did. Could you please confirm if my understanding is right and I'd better not use the same keywords on two or more pages? If yes, what is the best practice for linking to the pages that are not in the main menu? Let's say, I decided to do blog posts for the areas my appliance repair company serves and to optimize those pages for respective keywords. So, I have pages like "Appliance Repair Service in Brentwood" (which is optimized for "appliance repair brentwood" keyword), "Appliance Repair Service in Beverly Hills" ("appliance repair beverly hills" keyword), etc. I thought that the best way to link to them is to put the same anchor texts: "appliance repair beverly hills", etc. But it looks like the best way would be to use the anchor texts like "Beverly Hills", "appliance servicemen in Beverly Hills". Please tell me if I am right? Any explanation, advise or referral would be much appreciated! Thank you!
Link Building | | kirupa0 -
What is the difference between anchor text and external links?
I understand you 'Pro's' may fins this a silly question. But I'm a visual learner and I can't seem to grasp this. I've read the pages MOZ has provided on anchor text and external links and my question is, how are they different? And which one is more important to seo? Can someone who has a great ability to simplify things, please help me understand this. They seem very similar to me but, I know there has to be more to it. External links: External Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source) **Anchor Text: **Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. Thanks is advance, Lauren.
Link Building | | MissThumann0 -
Tooltip text
Will adding tooltip text to al my links improve my rankings? I read some article, but it's a hell of a job to add tooltip text to al my links. i was wondering if it's worth the time: A tooltip text appears if the mouse hovers over the image or a link and is provided by using the TITLE attribute. A description of the image or the link then appears in the tooltip in a small yellow box (Internet Explorer). The TITLE text (tooltip text) gives a short description of a link or image. The difference between an ALT text and the TITLE text is that the ALT text is a short description that replaces the image if the image does not load. The number of links (internal and external) and images must be equal to the number of tooltips for every page. The number of TITLE text can be higher because ALT text can also be used for other HTML elements. Add Title texts to links or images for those which do not have them yet. Thanks!
Link Building | | Happy-SEO3 -
If Anchor Text is dead, how do I target certain keywords?
I get it, a truly authoritative source will not be able to control the exact anchor text that others link to it with. Google is trying to deliver the most authoritative source, so non-exact anchor text is more likely a good option for them. This makes total sense and I have been varying the anchor text of my blog posts. But this begs the question: How am I supposed to know I am increasing my rankings for the high volume key words in my industry, and not leaving it up to Google to decide which keywords are most important?
Link Building | | CleanEdisonInc1 -
Links under Rich Snippet Text?
I was curious how certain sites have links under their rich snippet texts? is it from google authorship? iaNqX.jpg
Link Building | | Modbargains0 -
Over Optimised Anchor Text
Hi. We are new to the seomoz community so just getting the hange of it. We have run a few reports and found that we have to many links with the eaxct match anchor text. We are as a result we feel penalised and held back at no.7 or lower. There doesn't seem to be any other logical explanations why aren't higher besides that. What would the best way to deal with this over optimisation issue? Thanks
Link Building | | GardenGamer
Shannon0 -
If I write a PR release on a site such as PRweb with anchor-text links that is picked up and published by other news sites, do the engines consider this duplicate content or additional, beneficial links?
I recently wrote a news release on PRweb that was picked up identically by 8 other news websites, with the same anchor-text links as the original. Is the reproduction of duplicate content and links across different websites like this to the benefit or detriment of SEO and ranking power? Some of the links are: http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/view/pressrelease/eventa-new-eventa-christmas-parties-website-is-launched-648923?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Alert&utm_content=pressrelease http://www.prweb.com/releases/christmasparties/neweventasite/prweb8562064.htm Many thanks!!
Link Building | | RobertHill0 -
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