Articles / Balanced Profile
-
Hello SEOMOZ,
I have a couple of questions that I am hoping you all can answer for me.
1. We have heard that having anchor text links in article directories that are identical actually hurts our rankings and is considered spam at this point. We have hundreds of articles posted to various article directories throughout the web with this consistent identical anchor text. If we go into these articles and change the anchor texts, will the search engines recognize this change and give us credit for the new varied anchor text or will the credit stay with the original anchor text the article was posted with?
2. From here on out if we write unique stories with different anchor texts pointing to our website pages is their any gain to it and additionally will this even out our link profile? Or are placing anchor text links in article directories not the way to go?
-
Google says they want a "natural" looking anchor text pattern as they don't want anyone buying links. Thus, you are correct in that they are penalizing you for having the same anchor text in your links.
You need to focus on words that people would actually be searching for to find your site and like what they find. If I was running www.houserestoration.com and drove people via the anchor text "kittens," people would not like my site as it wasn't relevant to their needs/interests as they are looking for information about "house restoration," not "kittens."
Likewise, even words closer to your category might not be the best. People searching for "house" can be looking for a lot of things, but I' d say given a Google search for "house" that more people looking for House (the TV show), Government branches, or Real Estate which have nothing to very little to do with "house restoration."
You know what your customers are looking for. Use those words.
-
Yes, the search engines will eventually recognize the varied anchor text. It will be a slow recognition.
-
Erica, I appreciate the response but I have another question that maybe you can answer. Lets say my URL is www.houserestoration.com and I have 100 directories with the anchor text "House Restoration" in the body of the article.
It appears that with this consistent anchor text I have dropped in the rankings so I assume this has affected me negatively. So I want to make some changes, so now I go into directories and I insert "house" as an anchor text link to my url and in another article I put the anchor text as "restoration".
In another separate article I will put "house" anchor text in one paragraph and in the same article a few paragraphs down I'll put "restoration" as an anchor text.
In your opinion is this mixing it up enough or does it have to be different anchor texts like "housing repairs" or "household restoring techniques"?
I also tend to think that just putting an anchor text like "old house" or "living quarters" is not specific enough to help the url / term I am trying to boost.
So in your opinion what other anchor text words would you use? Also is there anyone else with extensive knowledge about this topic that can help us figure out the best direction to go with this?
-
I appreciate the information but I would still like the other question to be answered if possible.
If we go into these articles and change the anchor texts, will the search engines recognize this change and give us credit for the new varied anchor text or will the credit stay with the original anchor text the article was posted with?
- Thankyou.
-
Having the same anchor text on every link does look funny to Google. Will they penalize you? I don't know. But it does look like you're linkbuilding in a specific way. It's better to have a variety of anchor text because it looks more like natural links as that's what humans would do if you weren't telling them what to put there.
That said, while directories do still provide link juice, the signal from them is not as strong as it once was. Identical anchor text from directories may also be treated differently due to the submittal nature of directories.
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
-
Can you get "link juice" from an outside company's/organization's intranet?
Will you get the same "link juice benefits" from a University, Government Org, or public company's intranet that are linked to your webpages – vs the benefits that you would get from links from their public webpages? Assume that the external webpages have very high Domain Authority, MozRank/Trust etc.
Link Building | | MLR0 -
Why articles submitted to squidoo not indexed by google
Hi, I have written a few articles and uploaded to squidoo/hubpage last month and they have been accepted and I can see the links in the articles. But they dont appear in the latest link report from Google Webmaster Tools. Is it because it's delay or Google simply wont treat them as valid links? Thanks
Link Building | | LauraHT0 -
What's a really good example of a linkbait-y Category / Subcategory hierarchy?
Rand makes a really great point in this 2009 post about the shape of crawl paths: "#4. Craft navigation / category pages that are worthy of links. If you can make these pages worthy of links and attention, you drive PageRank and crawl priority further down your site's architecture into the content (and signal the engine that ALL your pages are important." Which makes sense, intuitively, because you'd like link juice to flow directly and undiluted to your money pages. "Here's all my Green Widgets, Roger: they're all right here. While you're at it, here's a related blog post—'5 Ridiculously Awesome Things Every Green Widget Buyer Should Know'—and, oh look! Would you like to see my Blue Widgets as well?" In practice, though, the Home » Widgets » Green Widgets doesn't sound all that alluring. Useful, absolutely, for UX, but not for getting links. Anyone have some favorite examples of Category / Subcategory hierarchies that do well as link-bait? Client is a marketing agency dealing in the technical arcana of databases and ad serving, so their money pages won't be as specific as a Green Widget or a Miami Hotel. Their site isn't huge, and the pages will be extensively interlinked, so the emphasis has more to do with link juice / page authority than indexation. But I'm wondering if it could it be smart to replace a generic "Services" category with a KW-rich drop-down menu of "Marketing Solutions" (i.e. 'Increase Customer Retention') and link each landing page to a relevant charcuterie of services, white papers, webinars, case studies, etc., rather than keeping these pages in their respective silos—even as they link horizontally to related services?
Link Building | | sweetfancymoses2 -
Smashing Magazine SEO article today: Question about a few things in it...
First off, here is the link - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/06/28/content-creators-benefit-from-new-seo/ Right, Number 5 and particularly this part: 'Quick tip for creatives: Set up a personal Google+ profile and incorporate the rel=author link into your published content. (Instructions on how to do this are provided in the next section.)' Create a personal Google+ profile page with a high-quality headshot; Validate your email address; In the byline of any content that you create, set the anchor text to be your name as it appears in your Google+ profile, and link to your profile with a URL that looks like this:https://plus.google.com/102318046680468697385?rel=author. When your content is published, link back to its URL from the “Contributor to” section of your Google+ profile. So lets say you got a Google+ profile, you got a guest post going out on a Auth website, in the byline you have an anchor text link (which is your profile name) and your linking to your profile page. The guest post goes up, you go into your Google+ profile and link to the guest post through 'Contributor to'. How does this benefit your websites rankings? The only thing I can see it benefiting is the blog the guest post is on??
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
One folder/keyword seems penalized.
Hi, One of the keywords i am optimizing for seems to be penalized. We are selling childrens clothes and we have 1 folder/url for each producer/designer. Main page is strong compared to competitors and we are ranging 1st for 2 most important keywords. Most of our other producer pages are ranking 2nd-4th. I took some time to rank and I had a some catalogues(hotvsnot, addsitelink, webzdirectory, 3 blogs) link into this specific folder some 3 months ago. It didnt seem to rise in ranks staying in range 12th-23rd spot. Which seemed sort of weird to me. 2 Days ago it dropped to around 120th spot. No other pages on site dropped. Looking at it now I do see that its almost 100% 'producername' in anchor text which i guess is the reason for the ranking problem and maybe the drop in rankings a couple of days ago. Blog links are completly natural, catalogues are not i guess. The total sum of links doesnt seem natural because the anchor text is same on all. Still its not that unnatural if you sell nike shoes to have a catalogue called nike and the anchor text to be pointing to it to be nike, but still. So my question is: do i try to change anchor text in catalogues or have them completely removed ? Do i get blogs etc to link to my site using an other word than the producer name that might seem less natural ?? Thanks for your help.
Link Building | | danlae0 -
I'm still not convinced by Panda/Penguin...
Okay, granted, it's still early. But supposedly Panda/Penguin has "changed SEO" so spammy back links from web 2.0 sites (like Squidoo and Hub Pages) won't be worth anything, right? Why then, did I get a Google Alert yesterday (for one of the keywords I'm trying to rank for) for a Squidoo lens that has not only pushed a certain website up to top 10, but overtook my top 10 spot (pushing me back to page 2 or 3)? It's pretty frustrating (doubly so on an already poopy Monday!) to try to be all white-hat with link building, including writing good content (which I do), and yet get beat consistently by other folks who are clearly doing the grayish-hat stuff. Thoughts?
Link Building | | AngieHerrera2 -
Are links in sponsored articles juicy?
Hi There I've been offered a sponsored article in a national newspaper that can contain up to 3 dofollow links. Something similar to this http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/271282 The question is would this be seen by Google as a paid link (which it is really I guess) and thereby pass no link juice? It's pretty expensive so don't want to get it wrong. Any thoughts gratefully received!
Link Building | | mou0 -
How useful/ damaging is it to have links repeated on every page ?
Our site is dynamic in nature we have tens of thousands of indexed pages with numerous individual brands pages - all of the brand pages are equally important. We are trying to distribute link juice to those pages as much as possible - so my question is --- Is it smart and or useful or perhaps damaging or spammy to have a space on the bottom of each page throughout our site with links to each and every single brand page ? is this practice considered as duplicate content etc ?
Link Building | | AJMKristi0