Advantages of Replacing Anchor Text with an Image?
-
Greetings,
I was reading the a recent case study pertaining to Penguin 2.1. (My website was hit hard)
It stated: "While classifying the website’s anchor texts (sorted by count), the first thing that strikes you is that the vast majority of the anchors are straight money keywords, which could be a possible reason for the penalty." My website suffers from a similar situation.
Is there any advantage to replacing the links to my website on my affiliate sites with images instead of using Anchor Text? My manager is concerned with losing so many backlinks.
Thanks!
-
I wouldn't count on affiliate links passing value to your site in the long term.
Note that most of the presentation is addressed to affiliates rather than to the program owners. Google tries to identify affiliate links and discount them, so you might not be gaining any value from these links anyway. If the links come from low-authority or low-quality sites AND have anchor text, it's surely not worth the risk. From Google's perspective, you shouldn't try to gain link equity from a link when financial compensation is involved. Ads, affiliate links, and other paid-for links should technically all be nofollow.
Images and branded links for affiliates may help avoid penalties (even though Google will probably devalue the links eventually), but where you're already penalized and in need of a manual reconsideration, I'd just get as close to what Google wants as possible.
-
I think if you're hit by the Penguin update then Google has already deemed you have bad/unnatural links pointing to your site to game rankings. The first step is to identify those links. Then you can start thinking about getting them removed or using the disavow tool to disavow them.
I don't think replacing the anchor text with image will help at all. You might be even harming yourself by removing legit links.
-
Hello,
I Will recommend you to change your anchor text links to the image links. After Penguin you cannot build anchor text backlinks so do it with images..
Perfect example is Wooecommerce website they have alot of image backlinks and they are sitting on top spots.
Thanks
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
-
Do spam text links count for negative seo?
I run a high-PR (or whatever we're calling it now) website builder. When you sign up, your URL is a subdomain of the main site (like yourname.foo.com). My site is lucky enough to be on the spammers radar, so they frequently create sites to get more back links. A while back, I caught onto this and neutralized their links (even though they had nofollow tags) by only displaying them as plain text instead of anchor tags. Spammers continue to sign up and create sites, even though their links are now text. My question: Are these text links still affecting my SEO negatively? Or do they know something I don't?
Link Building | | watilo0 -
Anchor Text Guidelines
Hi. Is there an approximate guide to avoid over optimizing anchor text for a particular key-phrase? i.e. is 20% of back-links using the anchor text [HR Software] OK or too much? Thanks in advance
Link Building | | davidoff5744440 -
Does Localeze replace the need for manual verifications?
I work with a lot of clients in the insurance industry. For many of them, local results are their best chance for showing up on page one of search results for these competitive keywords. I've been looking at signing them up for enhanced Localeze accounts to help increase their structured citations. Is Localeze an effective solutions for claiming structured citations, or is manually claiming listings more effective? Thanks in advance for your help!
Link Building | | copyjack0 -
Remove links or change anchor text?
I am currently in the process of cleaning up the link profile for a website that has been hit by Penguin thanks to loads of links from free directories with exact match keyword anchor texts (about 200 root domains from total of 300 root domains). I was wondering whether it's best to remove these un-natrual keyword anchor text links altogether, or change the anchor texts to brand (domain name, domainname.com, www.domainname.com, http://www.domainname.com)? I am currently trying to remove these links but was thinking it would be quicker to get to a healthier link profile (in terms of brand/commercial anchor text split) by altering the anchor texts and not removing them. Some of these directories are the worst of the worst on the other hand. Also note that I'm only really getting about a 30% response rate from the owners of these directories. Any thoughts? Many thanks in advance.
Link Building | | ec9awp0 -
Text Link vs image link?
Which passes most link juice a text link or an image with the correct 'alt' attribute? Do the pass the same amount or is one more valuable than the other?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Rel="canonical" or text link?
Lets say I have a commercial website that nobody will link to so I create a non commercial website with some awesome content that is highly linkable. I then get 30 - 40 quality links pointing to this site which I then either rel ="canonical" back to my main site to the page with the replica content or do I simply add a text link from the new site to the old sites homepage. Which would benefit my commercial site most? We are seeing the strategy of building a non commercial site for links becoming more and more popular. The second question is is it worth the effort for in effect one backlink?
Link Building | | fazza470 -
Is there any tool in/or out of SEOMOZ where we can check anchor texts for internal/external links for a website?
I just want to check anchor text of all the links for a specific URL within a website
Link Building | | merkal20050 -
Anchor text distribution
Hey SEO Mozosphere - Working on a link buying strategy. I know it is wise to target not only anchor text links but also branded text links to keep your anchor text distribution looking natural. However, do you think it would be too risky to ask for branded text links only from low PR sites and focus the more valuable keyword anchor text links on high PR sites?
Link Building | | znotes0