How defined does the anchor text need to be for a domain url?
-
Ok, I'm looking to clean up my domain with irrelevant Anchor text linking to specific URL's. Whether, it's my root domain or a particular product URL. I'm finding a wide variety of terms (anchor text) pointing to my homepage, category and finally my product pages.
Example, the Anchor text "Paragon Print Systems" is pointing to my homepage "barcodefactory.com" does this hurt my homepage enough to either have the link/anchor text removed from linking to my homepage?
thanks much!,
Warren
-
thanks Rob! much appreciated
Warren
-
Hi Warren,
Generally speaking, it is very common to see most links pointing to the Home Page of a website. This may not be the case in e-commerce sites which specialize in the niche product. In that case, you might expect heavy inbound linking to your product pages rather than your Home page. If irrelevant links make up the majority of your link profile (i.e. Automotive links pointing to a Lawyer's website) then they will not do much to help you and may harm your relevancy score with Google.
In your example, if nothing on barcodefactory.com features "Paragon Print Systems", then it is not doing you as much good as if your site had a page dedicated to it.
There are some great video tutorials Rand did on the value of anchor text:
Anchor Text General Rules:
https://moz.com/blog/all-about-anchor-text-whiteboard-friday
How To Avoid Over-Optimization With Anchor Text:
https://moz.com/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization
Where Anchor Text Is Now:
Generally speaking, you want to make sure that anchor text from links is branded rather than commercialized. What this means is that you want your brand to show up in the anchor rather than the product itself. For example, if you wanted to sell Goodyear tires, you would want the anchor text to read "Goodyear tires" rather than "tires for sale" or "cheap tires".
To answer your question in brief, unless the link is coming from a completely irrelevant or spammy source, you are probably gaining more from it than you would removing it based on the anchor text alone.
Hope this helps and feel free to follow up with me if you like,
Rob
-
Hey Warren,
Personally irrelevant Anchor text isn't bad at all it shows that your site is doing true link building as google wants other people to be building the links and choosing the Anchor for you.
Sometimes it can help you break up your Anchor text too which is great as Big G doesn't like overused Anchor texts.
I love using ahrefs.com Anchors Cloud to really get a good understanding of Anchors. I would be more worried if an Anchor is been over used.
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 non-canonical pages need to worry about things like Alt Text, H1 tags, etc?
Just wanted to confirm, if we have multiple similar pages, with all of their canonicals pointing towards the prime page, does it impact SEO rankings at all if the non-canonical pages were missing alt text from their images, or shared duplicate or multiple H1 tags? Basic SEO page construction stuff? I know some will hurt user CTR but wanted to make sure that SEO crawlers don't care about them even if indexed.
On-Page Optimization | | SimonZM2 -
How do you handle URLs with slashes?
I asked this question before, but with a different scenario. I upgraded my plan to a more advanced cart and all of my URLs changed about 1.5 years ago. I knew nothing about redirects and such, so none of that was done. Basically, let's say my site was: http://www.abc.com, but when people actually visit my site, they are directed to https://www.abc.com/. I have asked my host about redirecting and she that it is not possible. In the past, the link shared has been just www.abc.com . Will this hurt my ranking? My second question is ...let's say I have a link http://www.abc.com/blog , but now, the link is http://www.abc.com/blog/ . Will I be affected, since all my old links omit the slash?
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
Redirect both / and non-/ URLs?
I am doing SEO on WP site. Due to some duplicate pages (rel canonical was done before) I am doing 301 redirects at the moment. And I wonder if I need to redirect both links w/ and w/o trailing slash. Default is non www, w/o trailing slash. Like there is .com/category/news but there is same page linked in .com/news (well it works when permalink structure is set to /%category%/%postname% and returns 404 error when structure is set to /%postname%).
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ
I redirected .lt/naujienos to .lt/category/naujienos. Should I also redirect .lt/naujienos/ (with trailing slash)? There's absolutely no problem redirecting this, but there are some more pages which I want to edit their URLs and I wonder If I should do both redirects from links /w and w/o slash?1 -
Getting Google to provide a different URL in SERP
For one of my client’s sites, I have several keywords that are ranking in the top 5 positions. However, they have a high bounce rate. I believe this is because Google is delivering a different URL than the page we have optimized for the keyword. Any suggestions on ways I can get Google to present our preferred page?
On-Page Optimization | | TopFloor0 -
Hierarchy and consistency in ecommerce URLs
One of the first things I remember reading about SEO and URLs, a long time ago, is that keywords are important, and hierarchy is important, for search engines and for users. Hierarchy in URLs would give the search engines an idea of the structure of the site, and users would be able to edit the URLs to continue navigating. I'm wondering about URLs, hierarchy and usability lately, since I've seen that ASOS uses a new URL structure on their site. At first glance, I thought it was brilliant, so I would like to get all of your opinions as well. For those of you that haven't seen the URLs: for categories, ASOS uses a structure as you would expect it, but for products they don't insert the category in the URL. Instead they insert the brand name as the first part of the URL, followed by the product title. Some examples: Category:
On-Page Optimization | | DocdataCommerce
www.asos.com/women/dresses/... Product:
www.asos.com/french-connection/french-connection-tie-waist-pocket-stripe-dress/... I can see the importance of brand name for a site like ASOS, and like how they stressed this by inserting not the category but the brand for products. I don't know how much ASOS still relies on organic non-ASOS related keyword traffic, but still. Now, for hierarchy, I guess a good internal linking structure will tell the search engines about the hierarchy of a site as well, right? So perhaps hierarchy in the URL isn't that important? Perhaps something like this would be just as good as anything, given a good internal link structure? www.onlinestore.com/category/
www.onlinestore.com/subcategory/
www.onlinestore.com/brand/product-title/ Now, I understand that if you use this structure, you wouldn't be able to have men/shirts and women/shirts, but let's say that you don't have subcategories that use the same names. In this case, how important is hierarchy? And, what do you think about this URL structure for an ecommerce site for which brands are important?0 -
Website review needed
Hello, We need advice about seo for website http://www.oluadeonline.com/ The keywords provided are - Make Money Online, Online Services, Work At Home, Online Money, Online Business, Online Work Its seems impossible to rank the site for these keywords as there is too much competition
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_20050 -
Does google treat all urls equal?
Sorry for the lame title, i couldn't think of a better one. I want to know if google treats this: http://www.domain.com/products/some-product-name the same as it would treat: http://www.domain.com/?products=some-product-name if not, could you tell me the differences?
On-Page Optimization | | adriandg0 -
What is the best way to make use of internal anchor text links without appearing to be a 'spammy' webpage?
I've recently been spending some time going through all the content on our website, henstuff.com, adding internal anchor text links to product copy with the link following back to the product's generic catagory. I've been focusing on the search term 'hen party accessories', but have also been using 'hen do accessories' and 'hen night accessories'. I know that internal linking has value when it comes to SEO and rankings, but was keen to find roughly at what point usage of a certain search term for anchor links is seen as spam by the engines. Is there a certain formula to follow when it comes to internal anchor text links? You can see some examples at: http://www.henstuff.com/hen-night-accessories/hen-party-accessories/willy-bubbles http://www.henstuff.com/hen-night-accessories/hen-party-devil-horns/hen-night-pink-devil-horns Many thanks Oli
On-Page Optimization | | RobertHill1