Is Google now punishing anchor text?
-
Hi All,
I was just wondering if Google is starting to punish anchor text links? I've noticed that one of my clients domains has slightly reduced and they have slipped a few places in rankings for a key term since. I found this bizarre as the last few links I built were both relevant and strong but I did use an anchor text?
Any feedback would be useful, I'm slightly confused here?
-
I would download an OSE report set to external links only, to entire root domain. Use an advanced report if you have the credits.
Then I would check the anchor text usage to each of the key pages.
Try to do quality link work - linkbait rather than link 'building' - Yer, I know, everyone says that - but really! Write some decent articles that people will WANT to read - if they want to read them, they will want to share/link to them.
If you do end up 'building' links though, do so by really high quality methods. Manually reach out for guest posts on decent blogs - tie this in with Google+ author profile links to the sites G+ account (the authors), and in terms of anchors, be natural! Go for what the blogger thinks should be used - usually this will be either www.domain.com/ or 'Brand Name'.
In short - don't try to manipulate your anchor text in order to gain organic Google rankings - this kind of practise is now more out of date than ever, won't likely work very well anymore, and could in fact be counter productive.
Hope that helps! Stick with it, do lots of research, start to identify and engage with a site's audience both on-page and off, and you will be fine
-
Many thanks for your reply, I will assess the link profile as see if there is a weight on one of the keywords.
-
Hi,
Yes, there is a special filter for over optimisation related with anchor text.
If you have / build a lot of links with teh same anchor text - and overall in your link profile that dosen't really look natural you can receive a filter on that anchor text and only on that anchor text - nothing else is affected.
(in some cases on some variation of the anchor text).
So if you only lost traffic for one keyword that might be the case.
usually it's a manual action as far as I've seen in the past - but there is also an algo in place for this as far as I've understood (personably though I've only encounter manual action against anchor text).
In order to solve this issue - you need to clean / edit /delete some bad links that are looking un-natural using this anchor text.
Your anchor text assessment within your link profile should be the first step to solve this.
I don't know the domain and keyword so I don't know if EMD is an issue - but it's also something you can review (is the keyword the same with the domain name ?)
Cheers.
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
-
Export domain reference full on google search console
Hi all My website is https://simthanglong.vn/ and it have +7000 Referring domains from competitor use tools bad backlink. i want to disavow it but Google Search Console accept export up to 1000 domains. So, What I have to do. Help me Please.67oetuz.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | simthanglongdotvn0 -
Back links to pages on our site that don't exist on forums we haven't used with irrelevant product anchor text
Hi, I have a recurring issue that I can't find a reason for. I have a website that has over 7k backlinks that I monitor quite closely. Each month there are additional links on third party forums that have no relevance to the site or subject matter that are as a result toxic. Our clients site is a training site yet these links are appearing on third party sites like http://das-forum-der-musik.de/mineforum/ and have anchor text with "UGG boots for sale" to pages on our url listed as /mensuggboots.html that obviously don't exist. Each month, I try to contact the site owners and then I add them to Google using the disavow tool. Two months later they are gone and then are replaced with new backlinks on a number of different forum websites. Quite random but always relating to UGG boots. There are at least 100 extra links each month. Can anyone suggest why this is happening? Has anyone seen this kind of activity before? Is it possibly black hat SEO being performed by a competitor? I just don't understand why our URL is listed. To be fair, there are other websites linked to using the same terms that aren't ours and are also of a different theme so I don't understand what the "spammer" is trying to achieve. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rufo
KInd Regards
Steve0 -
How does Google handle product detail page links hiden in a <noscript>tag?</noscript>
Hello, During my research of our website I uncovered that our visible links to our product detail pages (PDP) from grid/list view category-nav/search pages are <nofollowed>and being sent through a click tracking redirect with the (PDP) appended as a URL query string. But included with each PDP link is a <noscript>tag containing the actual PDP link. When I confronted our 3rd party e-commerce category-nav/search provider about this approach here is the response I recieved:</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">The purpose of these links is to firstly allow us to reliably log the click and then secondly redirect the visitor to the target PDP.<br /> In addition to the visible links there is also an "invisible link" inside the no script tag. The noscript tag prevents showing of the a tag by normal browsers but is found and executed by bots during crawling of the page.<br /> Here a link to a blog post where an SEO proved this year that the noscript tag is not ignored by bots: <a href="http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/" target="_blank">http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/<br /> </a> <br /> So the visible links are not obfuscating the PDP URL they have it encoded as it otherwise cannot be passed along as a URL query string. The plain PDP URL is part of the noscript tag ensuring discover-ability of PDPs by bots.</p> <p>Does anyone have anything in addition to this one blog post, to substantiate the claim that hiding our links in a <noscript> tag are in fact within the SEO Best Practice standards set by Google, Bing, etc...? </p> <p>Do you think that this method skirts the fine line of grey hat tactics? Will google/bing eventually penalize us for this?</p> <p>Does anyone have a better suggestion on how our 3rd party provider could track those clicks without using a URL redirect & hiding the actual PDP link?</p> <p>All insights are welcome...Thanks!</p> <p>Jordan K.</p></noscript></nofollowed>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eImprovement-SEO0 -
Google webmasters tools, Majestic and Ahref in a simple case study (Bad links and Good links)
Hey guys, This case study started from here. A simple summary, I discover that I got +1000 backlinks from Blogspot though Google webmasters tools after making a connection with owners of these blogs which points to my new blog. Before starting I proudly invite Thomas Zickell and Gary Lee in this discussion. I wish you accept my invitation. Let's go to the main point, I've used Google webmaster tools so I will start with. Then Ahref which used by **Thomas **and then Majestic which used by Gary. Take a look at "001" screenshot, you will see that Google webmaster tools discovered 1291 links points to my site. Take another look at "002" screenshot, you will find that there are 22 domains points to my site. Most of them are good links since they are coming from websites such as Google.com, Wikipedia.org, Reddit, Shoutmeload, WordPress.org, ...etc. Beside +1000 backlinks came from Blogspot.com (blogs). Also, there's some bad links such as this one came from tacasino.com Necessary to say that I've got some competitors and they nicely asked me to stop the competition for some keywords and I've ignored their request. So, I'm not surprised to see these bad links. At "002" screenshot, we can see that Google didn't discover the bad links as they discovered the good links. And they discovered a lot of backlinks which not discovered by any other tools. **Let's move to Ahref, ** I will use screenshots provided by Thomas. At "003" screenshot, you can see Ahref report that say 457 links from 10 domains. By the way, social engagements data are wrong. I got more than zero engagements .. really. At "004" screenshot, you can see domains points to my site, links with anchor text. Take a look at the second link you will find that it's a spammy link coming from PR2 home page since it's is over optimized. the third link is also a spammy link since it coming from a not-relevant website. Beside other bad links need to be removed. So, Ahref didn't discover all of my good links. Instead of that it discovered few good links and a lot of bad links. In a case like this a question come needs to be answered since there are some people trying so hard to hurt my site, Do I have to remove all this bad links? Or, just links discovered by Google. Or, Google understand the case? **Let's move to majestic, ** Gray Lee provided data from majestic which say "10 Unique Referring Domains, with 363 links, 2 domains make up a majority." Since Gray didn't take any screenshots I will provide mine. At "005" screenshot, you can see some of the bad links discovered by Majestic. Not all of them discovered by Ahref or Google. In the other hand, Majestic didn't discover all of my Good links. Also, there's a miss understand I would like to explain here. When I published the Discussion about +1000 link. Some people may think that I trying to cheat you by providing fake info and this totally wrong. I said before and I'm saying that again you are so elite and I respect you. Also, I'm preparing for an advanced case study about this thing. If any expert would like to join me this will be great. Thank you for reading and please feel free to share you thoughts, knowledge and experience in this Discussion. EE5bFNc jYg21cf Xyfgp28.png iR4UOwi.png D1pGAFO
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eslam-yosef1 -
How do you change the 6 links under your website in Google?
Hello everyone, I have no idea how to ask this question, so I'm going to give it a shot and hopefully someone can help me!! My company is called Eteach, so when you type in Eteach into Google, we come in the top position (phew!) but there are 6 links that appear underneath it (I've added a picture to show what I mean). How do you change these links?? I don't even know what to call them, so if there is a particular name for these then please let me know! They seem to be an organic rank rather than PPC...but if I'm wrong then do correct me! Thanks! zorIsxH.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Website that lost ranking and now starting to recovery
Hello guys,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WayneRooney
About a month ago we got in the webmaster tool a message that saying that we have unnatural links to the website.
We got drop from 200 keys that was in page 1-2 to pages 5-8.
We check our links and notice that someone links more then 1000 links to our site. We apply for reconsideration request plus we send the file with the links to Google to ask to remove. Yesterday we got message from Google that say : Manual spam action revoked.
We check today the ranking and we saw that from 3 keys that was in the first page, now we are with 24 in the first page. Very good improvement but still very far from the 130 keys that was in the first page a month ago. I wanted to ask, what can we expect ?
Are we gonna get the lost ranking now ?
Is this happen overnight ?Maybe the big change will be in the next penguin update ? Bottom Line, what is the chance to get back the ranking as we had before ?
This is the most important thing right now... Thank you0 -
How does the Google Treat 301 Redirects?
Hi, My website was one of many that dropped in rankings this last Friday, The company that i outsourced my SEO 4 months ago did a bad job. Now i'm doing everything my self to recover, so i was thinking getting a new hosting, duplicate the website with a same content (i have original quality content) and 301 my old domain to new one? How long can it last with Google? Can penalties be passed via 301 redirects ? Looking forward to your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mezozcorp0 -
Is Google stupid?
Why does buying links still work? I don't mean approaching an individual webmaster and cutting a deal, that seems to be nearly impossible to detect. But the huge link brokers, like Text Link Ads, Build my Rank or Linkvine, Google has to be aware of them, right? Can't they just create accounts to see the whole network, and ban the sites? Why wouldn't they just do that?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | menachemp0