Link Anchor Text - Best Practice?
-
Moz - Open Site Explorer using the following setup:
Tab: Inbound Links
Show: "all"
from: "Only Internal"I have run a number of random tests and have noticed the following results in the link anchor text.
[No Anchor Text]
company name
website url
Home
etc.What is the best practice and naming convention to be used?
Regards Mark
-
Hi Mark,
Is the link part of a navigation menu? If so I don't see any problem with leaving it as 'Home'. If you're linking within the body of a page (for instance in a blogpost), something like 'visit the homepage' or just a branded term should be fine.
-
Thank you for your quick and detailed response.
Apologies, I think I have not explained my question well...See link: http://imgur.com/iDy0E1Z
As you can see, every url has the same link anchor text named 'Home'.
My question is:
What is the best naming convention for this link anchor text. Should i simply leave it blank, call it 'Home', my website url, etc.Regards Mark
-
Hi Mark,
When it comes to link building (internal or external) there are few thumb rules -
- The link should look natural
- The link should point to a useful resource
Lets take the example of internal links -
If say i own a digital marketing agency, and i want the home page to rank for the keyword "digital marketing". Old school SEO would suggest that I use "digital marketing" as one of the anchor texts and create links from inner pages to the home page. Trust me two years ago that tactic worked. But now lets evaluate from a users perspective, a user is say reading a blog that talks about Facebook as a marketing tool and sees the anchor text "digital marketing".With the reading flow, the user would probably expect a post that gives more insight into digital marketing but alas he is taken to the home page. You getting the drift? Same logic is used by search engines, on the website the links should be used to indicate hierarchy and more importantly help the users. Occasional use of keywords in the anchor text is fine.
Now lets look at external links -
With the advent of Penguin update that focuses on over optimization (both on page and off page), having keyword rich anchor texts (example - car loans) to point to your website from third party websites is not at all recommended. Also having links from general directories, general blogs etc is not considered a good practice. In short no shady link building techniques work. An ideal link profile will consist of anchor texts that are either brand terms or title of the post or other natural identifiers such as Click here. If you think about it, say you read an article that was very useful and wanted to link to it, would you use a keyword as anchor text or brand name as anchor text? Obviously you will chose the latter. So in order to have natural looking link profile, do not focus on keyword rich anchor text, focus on high quality relevant sites, focus on high quality content and more importantly focus on the target audience.
- Sajeet
-
Hi Mark,
With internal linking, your anchor text needs to be as descriptive as possible. Look at the page it leads to - does the anchor text accurately describe that? However, do not be spammy with it. Keep it clean and engaging and you will find people will click on it.
-Andy
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
-
What's the best way of crawling my entire site to get a list of NoFollow links?
Hi all, hope somebody can help. I want to crawl my site to export an audit showing: All nofollow links (what links, from which pages) All external links broken down by follow/nofollow. I had thought Moz would do it, but that's not in Crawl info. So I thought Screaming Frog would do it, but unless I'm not looking in the right place, that only seems to provide this information if you manually click down each link and view "Inlinks" details. Surely this must be easy?! Hope someone can nudge me in the right direction... Thanks....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rl_uk0 -
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Is a link inside a video player considered an inbound link from the domain the player is embedded in?
Good afternoon...We just added a link to our homepage inside the menu of our video player. In the link below, if you click on the menu icon in the bottom right corner of the video player, you'll see a "Powered by WellcomeMat" link at the bottom of the menu. http://www.wellcomemat.com/video/kt216e25172416n/-Rancho-Santa-Fe/Ca/92067/16596-Via-Lago-Azul/1234567890/ My question for the community is would that link be considered an inbound link from any site that has the video player embedded? So hypothetically, the video player is embedded into www.abcd.com. If a user would click on that link and go to our homepage, would search engines recognize that as an inbound link from abcd.com, even though it sits within our video player? And most of the time, the player sits within an iframe. So that's why I'm not 100% sure. Thanks for reading and for your help! It's much appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian7201 -
Link-building best SEO practice (one-off VS periodic blogging)
Hi all, Generally, what would be best when building a website's ranking through link building? Having the same links from the same bloggers or receiving new links from different bloggers every time? A lot of the SEO services offer 4-8 blog backlinks per month. Would it be best if these links came from different sources every time or most from the same sources each month? I know there's a lot of factors but I hope this question is clear. Happy holidays and thank you for your insightful feedback. Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 90miLLA0 -
Are Navigation links different to static links
We are trying to reduce the number of links on our homepage. We could remove some fly out navigation links, We rank 1st on Google for some of these links. Would removing these hurt our SEO. The links are accessible 1 level down if we remove the homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Archers0 -
Best linking practice for international domains
SEOMoz team, I am wondering that in the days of Panda and Penguin SEOs have an opinion on how to best link between international domains for a web page property. Let's say you have brandname.DE (German site) brandname.FR (French site) brandname.CO.UK (British site) Right now we are linking form each site on the page to the other two language sites to make users aware of the translated version of the site which obviously make it a site wide link which seems to be lately disencouraged by Google. Did anyone out there have any ideas how to strategically interlink between international domains that represent language versions of a web site? /PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0 -
Linking Back
Hello, I have a blog www.digitaldiscovery.eu and I have been working the link building. Now I have a few links pointing into my blog and in Google Webmaster and in Open Site Explorer I can see the URL of those websites. In scale from 1 to 10 how usefull is to have a blogroll in my blog pointing back to those high PR links? How usefull is this in link-building strategy? Tks in advance! PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Links to Facebook pages
I would like to ask if anyone has any knowledge regarding linking to a company's facebook page. I have built a few links to a client's facebook page in an effort to have it rank better in SERPs. I just learned that unlike twitter and linkedin, it is apparently not possibly to directly link to facebook pages. At least it is not possible from a search engine's perspective. If you follow any facebook page link while you are not logged into facebook, you are redirected to the facebook home page. I can't think of any way around this obstacle. I'd love some clever solution such as providing a URL which includes a basic dummy facebook login but there is nothing I am aware of to achieve this result. Does anyone have any ideas on this topic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0