Will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text attract Penguin’s wrath?
-
I'm working on a site for a serviced apartment site http://www.alcove.co.in/ which offers apartments in 9 cities in India. Site was ranking in 1st page of Google for “serviced apartment + city” for 7 cities until sometime in Jan 2013.
However organic traffic has been gradually falling since sometime in September 2012 (40% fall this month over same period last year). There’s been no sudden fall in traffic which we may link with any Penguin update. There have been no warning messages in Google WMT.
Even today the site ranks in 1st page for 3 cities; however ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’ which was the biggest revenue earner, is not ranked in first 5 pages.
My questions are whether
-
will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text will attract Penguin’s wrath,
-
does Google makes allowance for case when company's name includes keywords. In our case, company name is Alcove Service apartments,
-
could there be some other reason for fall in ranking/traffic?
The distribution of anchors (external links, multiple links from same domain are counted) is :
percent
Keywords 34%
brand+keywords 43%
Natural 4%
only brand 11%
URL 7%For the above,
-
Brand = ‘Alcove Service apartments’ or ‘Alcove Serviced apartments’
-
brand+keywords = various combinations of ‘alcove’ + [‘guest houses’ or ‘hotels’ or ‘accommodation’] + city1 + city2…
Intriguingly, Open Site Explorer analysis of domain metrics (Domain Authority, Followed Linking Root Domains, etc) ranks Alcove higher than all but one site appearing in 1st page of Google for ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’. Most of alcove’s links are from article directories (no spun articles were used), directories and link exchanges with relevant sites.
Any suggestions and guidance on what we could do to remedy the situation would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
-
-
Honestly, given that you currently have relatively few cities, consolidating might not have a big impact. I'd be cautious going forward, if you were going to expand into hundreds of markets or started having a ton of results under every market, but for now it probably makes more sense to improve your link profile and try to get some content on the site that isn't entirely search results.
-
Thanks, Dr. Peter. That's exactly the sort of inputs I was looking for.
Yes, as you notice, we have started links clean-up : deleting, changing anchor or disavowing.
It is hard to develop great content for a list of service apartments in a city. At my suggestion, client agreed to add 1 page for each property ( you will see more details... link below tariff table for each apartment) in April 2013.
Do you think we should combine all cities (e.g. http://www.alcove.co.in/tariff-bangalore.html )into a single page with a search form?
-
I was referring to the Nike back link as an example of what a "natural" anchor text profile would look like.
The majority of their links are Branded or URL (Nike).
Almost all the links contain the word "Nike" In It
A few contain their specific product keywords only (not Nike)
Its a great example to see percentage ratios compared to a spammy back link profile
-
My gut reaction is that this sounds much more Panda-like. We've seen many sites with geo-targeted pages and searches gradually lose ranking and traffic over the past couple of years. The problem is that Google has just generally started frowning on spinning out long-tail phrases just to target keywords, and in situations like "serviced apartments + city" I'm afraid that the content quite often ends up being thin.
In your case, though, I'm only seeing about 400 pages in Google's index, so it doesn't look like there are very many variations or that it's enough volume to trigger Panda-scale problems. I don't think these pages are very strong, as they're basically search results with minor variations in the copy/title/etc., but I'd be surprised to see a sudden ranking drop because of these pages.
Your link profile does seem to be populated with a lot of low-value directories and you're using long, exact-match anchor strings. It may not be the branded text so much as a lot of text that just looks unnatural. I also notice, though, that some of the links we have in OSE appear to be gone now:
http://impulsesdirect.org/detail/link-3883.htm
You may have started removal - I'm not sure. You could remove some of these, but frankly, you won't be left with a lot. Anything you do moving forward is going to have to involved building or attracting higher quality links and developing content that is more than just directory-style pages. Google just doesn't value niche directories the way they used to, and I think that attitude is here to stay, unfortunately (I have a former client in the same boat).
-
Karl,
I too feel that studying Nike's anchor profile would be frustrating because small businesses like ours cannot achieve that. Further, I am not sure that my site was hit by Penguin.
'serviced apartments bangalore' constitutes only 0.6% of total links. But combinations of this with other cities and terms was what I pushed most. 'Bangalore' occurs is 47% of links along with brand 'alcove' and other keywords (not all 47% of anchors have serviced apartments).
If articles' content is good and are posted on Article directories with PR > 1, can they do harm?
Thanks
-
Whilst Cesar is right than Nike has a perfect link profile, they don't really need to do much link building because they get it all done naturally for them. 99% of companies don't have the social interaction (or the budget!) that Nike does so it isn't really that helpful to study their linking profile.
Saying that, the majority of your links should be branded because when people are talking about you they are unlikely to link your website via an anchor text keyword. You need to create some linkable assets so, for example, content based around the cities you have apartments in and create some content that bloggers will want to have on their website.
Was "service apartments Bangalore" the keyword you pushed the most by any chance? Article directories have been seriously devalued and directories haven't been worthwhile for years now (unless they are really good!). I suggest looking through your backlink profile on OSE and Webmaster Tools and start to get rid of the article links because they will be doing you more harm than good.
-
Look at this and study it
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.nike.com
That's what it should look like
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
-
Homepage not showing up for Brand/Any keywords (on Google) all of a sudden
The homepage to this website is crawled and indexed, however, it's not showing up for any searches, even brand searches (eg: Klay schools). This happened overnight. Do you know what the underlying issue could be? Link to the homepage: https://www.klayschools.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vishesh10104 -
Should we go after this main keyword?
Hello, We run an online store. The main content keyword for our niche is very competitive, but if I was going to go look up information and I was one of our customers, that is exactly what I would type in - this main general keyword. We have an expert in the field to write it and plenty of time. Although the main keyword is competitive, there are many many subkeywords that are a lot less competitive that would be answered in the article. It's tough to find good topics in this niche. We're thinking about doing a "Complete Guide to X". We would have far less backlinks and authority for about half of the 30 keywords it will cover than our main competitors. Should we do this and spend the next couple of years working on it, or should we perhaps target a smaller topic? Any advice is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
What is the meaning of anchor text penalty?
If i have 70% back links with same anchor text, will i get penalized? some of my blog's pages which were previously in top 100 in google are no where now. but for other long tail keywords, m still in same position. How to get rid of this penalty? Should i create more links with different anchor text to reduce the effect or should i remove that 70% back links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | web2smspk0 -
Keyword Targeting Best Practices??
What is the best way to target a specific keyword? I rank well for several of my keywords but want to do better on others. How do I go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Using exact keyword domains for local SEO
The website is for the attorney that serves several nearby cities. The main page is optimized for the biggest central city. I have several options how to go after the smaller surrounding cities: 1. Create optimized pages inside the main domain 2. Get more or less exact keyword domains for each city e.g. for the city ABC get yourABClawyer.com and then a) use 1 page websites that use the same template as main website and link all the menu items to the main website b)use 1 page website with a link "for more information go to our main website" c) point exact keyword domains to the optimized pages within the main domain. Which option would be the best in terms of SEO and user experience? Would people freak out if they click on the menu item and go to a different domain website even though it uses the same template (option 2a) Would I get more bounces with option 2b in your opinion? Would option 2c have any positive SEO effect? Should I not even bother with exact keyword domain and go with option 1?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SirMax1 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0