Exact match anchor text is negative signal?
-
Hi all,
I am wondering if the exact match anchor text is 100% negative signal after the penguin. I mean even from relevant sites and natural use.
During the last 2 weeks I see negative SERP changes and I start to think that it is because exact match keyword anchor text is used. I also use some other anchor texts along with it all the time.. but now I think of using 100% exact match anchor free links.
Does anybody have similar observations?
Thank you in advance.
-
It's a balancing act. Google is looking for natural links, not paid or self directed. So percentages are good but you should also randamize your anchor text. If you develop a pattern, eventually the algo can determine that it is un natural. I would identify your most important keywords, maybe 5 and then mix in your brand name and the standard Click Here. Rotate them in a random way and you should be ok. Note your Brand should be the anchor text most often used. I hope this helps and good luck.
-
It depends how many exact match achors you have out there, from what sites and how relevent it is to your domain/title and content.
If your site is joeblow.com and it's content is about horse racing but you have 100 achors for "best horse racing tips" becuause that's what you want to rank for it is indicitive to google those links may not be natural and if deemed so you may lose some of the ranking juice from those links.
Devaluation of links has been a huge going on lately in the google backyard. Especially since Mr penguin migrated from the icy slopes.
-
Good point Russ, I guess the days of being able to analyze your links from a purely % point of view are numbered, if not, over.
-
I concur mostly with what Greg said, but I must add that it is no longer simply about %. Keeping a safe anchor text threshold has been a staple of quality SEO firms for the last 5 years. Instead, what is more likely going on, is that particular links get flagged based on some metric which, in turn, triggers some sort of deeper review (perhaps getting lumped into the next Penguin analysis).
Thus, it is not solely in your best interest to maintain a safe percentage, it is even more important to ensure that none of the links you acquire or have acquired in the past might be one of those triggers. This means avoiding any known networks, only doing in-content links, etc.
-
Hi Vasil,
I don't think having exact match anchor text is a negative signal in itself, as there are some sites and brands built on the back of an exact match domain name. It's more about the %'s involved, if you've focused on exact match anchor text too much over more branded terms, and more natural looking anchor text (eg. www.brandname.com, brandname.com, click here, brand name product, product name, etc.) then you may have suffered with the latest updates.
Here's some links for SEOMoz blog posts that might be of interest to you on this topic;
May 2nd, 2012 - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
Jan 5th, 2012 - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/all-about-anchor-text-whiteboard-friday
Sep 8th, 2011 - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beyond-exact-match-anchor-text-to-next-generation-link-signals-whiteboard-fridayHope that helps.
Greg
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
-
Anchor text
Hi, we have landing pages for our 10 branches and want to build up the geographical bases SEO. Eg Marketing Agency Bristol for www.caffeinemarketing.co.uk/bristol/ Do you have any articles or advice on the type of links and the anchor text. IE should anchor text be more geographical based? Thanks
Link Building | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
How important are 'anchor' text links now
We have started building some good links but I'm just wandering how important anchor based text ones are now.
Link Building | | nick-name123
I'm not talking about spamming/going too heavy but a few here and there. What's your recent experience?0 -
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!
Link Building | | CFSSEO0 -
Link text
Can anyone give me any advise regarding anchor text in back links on external sites. I have about 8 bloggers reviewing our products on their sites. When they link to our site, they either use the words of our company name or something like “click here” as the words in the link. There are a few key words that we are wanting to improve for so should those words be made as the live link on their site?
Link Building | | Hardley1110 -
Internal linking anchor text with automated ASP.NET link building
Hi Everyone I really need some help here, the problem I have must be one that many have. I have a simple e-commerce style website so 1 product page can in fact get 40-50 internal links to it. These links come from a mixture of: 1. The parent category pages that the product sits on (Rugged PDA) and in turn the 10 filter pages of this category page (Rugged PDA, ordered by battery size). 2. Alternative product list on other product pages, So many products link to each other as alternatives. From Google analytics we can see that visitors like to browse product to product seeing 5 alternatives on each page with titles like "Smaller", "more rugged" etc. 3. Manufactuer pages, so we have a link to each product from each manufacturer home page where we talk lots about each manufacture we resell. We also have links from images used in the website. So its a nice usable website but we're finding that Google is still telling us in Webmaster tools that it thinks some links are dubious and we're trying to find out why. We only now have 190 external links to the website, most are internal and from the website or our blog on a subdomain. The problem we think is that we generate the category and products pages all dynamically so the anchor text is looking the same. Will this potentially create issues for us? Dave
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
Why is ooshirts.com not being penalized for exact match keywords?
Clearly this site is buying links. They have the most exact match link profile I have ever seen. It appears their strategy has been to buy links for their domain as a way to mask all the other exact match purchases they are making. I have also been sent copies of the emails where they are attempting to purchase links. Thoughts?
Link Building | | bradwayland0 -
What is an example of good anchor text?
Hi, I'm sorry to ask yet another question but the advice I get here is always so accurate and friendly that it's almost addictive. After Penguin I'm constantly thinking about what looks natural to Google. With regards to link building I can't really envisage any situations where natural anchor text would be anything other than either the name of our company or 'click here'. The only exception to this I would have thought would be if a customer was referring to a particular product on our site. Even in this situation I would have thought they'd have said 'I bought my cheap cartridges at Refresh Cartridges' with the company name still being used as the anchor rather than 'cheap cartridges'. I think if we're stripping it down to what works best from a human rather than search engine perspective then using 'cheap cartridges' rather than the company name would be just a little odd. Therefore my question is whether, when link building, I should just use my company name for all anchor text rather than trying to artificially mix it up to make it look ‘natural’. While I could vary the anchor text by saying 'cheap this', 'high quality that' and playing around with the text, almost certainly when used in context with whatever I am writing this would look unnatural no matter how many combinations I used. Is this correct or would my overuse of the company name make what should be a natural looking linking strategy look unnatural and harm results by not conveying the potential content of the page by using targeted anchor text. Thanks for your help. Chris
Link Building | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Will online PR with optimized anchor-text hurt my SEO efforts?
With Google's recent phishing expedition and increased focus on natural link profiles etc where does this leave PR distribution with optimized anchor-text? Using the pai for PR distribution services has always been a great way to build backlinks but I just wonder whether these will be considered over-optimised in future?
Link Building | | jamesq0