Question Re Cornerestone Page And Anchor Text For Internal/External Links
-
Suppose I create a cornerstone page with the targeted keyword "Dog Collars". I write a dozen articles on various dog collars and point a link from each article to my cornerstone page. Should the anchor text for the links from each of those articles to the cornerstone page be "Dog Collars" or should they vary, but still be relevant to "Dog Collars" for best SEO? Should half of them be "Dog Collars" and the other half various? Also, if I have 12 articles and all of the anchor text is already "Dog Collars", should I go back and change them so that they all don't say the same thing?
If hope my question makes sense ... thanks in advance. I will give thumbs up for helpful responses and suggestions
-
Such as video (maybe a comparison of the pros and cons/features/styles/uses/quality of a variety of different collars), audio (interviews with retailers/veterinarians about what which ones they recommend/or sell the most) press release (maybe on a recall/particular new style/your investment in technology for 3D printing of dog collars)--that kind of thing.
-
Thanks Drew
-
Thanks Chris! One clarification ... when you say that you would be looking at "more than just written content", what specifically do you mean? What other type of content would you employ?
Thanks
-
Let the page and meta data do the talking for relevance and your off-page references do the talking for authority. If I was spending resources on "dog collars", I'd be looking at more than just written content and I'd be looking at how to get it hosted offsite, at locations where it would be able to generate signals of engagement--ideally from social profiles already that are already involved with anything that's thematically relevant. I'd also be concentrating on authorship and how to strengthen it's application to your brand from off-site.
If you're able to do those things with one or two pieces of content, the impact is going to be as strong or stronger than your 12 anchor text laden links--especially when you consider that Google is moving towards de-weighting the value of anchor text and keywords as a ranking factor.
In direct answer to your question, I think Drew gave a pretty good response but I'd reverse the percentage of "desired keywords" and "keyword alternatives" and I'd up the percentage of brand links a bit, while lowering the generic.
-
I'm new and this is my first response, but I believe your answer is as follows for proper anchor text:
20-30% desired keyword - "dog collars"
10-20% keyword alternatives - "pet collar" and the like
30% brand - "Pets R Us"
30% generic - "click here" "website" etc...
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
-
Need Professional Help with Site Structure, Page Authority, and Internal Linking
We are a 10 year + small (1000 pages) niche ecommerce site (Magento) that has recently lost rankings to a competitor. We out perform them in every metric so I do not understand them leap frogging us to the top spot. This has forced me to look at my site structure, page authority (rank), and internal linking. After reviewing a moz crawl issues report, here are some of my observations: Root domain has a PA of 40 Top 3 $ Category pages have a PA of 22, 18, 18 Multiple meaningless blog posts and other category/product pages have PA’s of 30+ Here is a screenshot of the crawl report with internal links, links, etc showing. I need some help - thoughts, suggestions, next steps in analysis?
On-Page Optimization | | SammyT0 -
Simple question: I wonder if I'm over internally linking?
Hi, What's you guys' policy on how much to internally link. I do it a lot - whenever it makes sense, but hold off if I just linked to the same page in the last paragraph, for instance. Would like to know your thoughts to see if I'm overdoing it. This is for Ecommerce blog posts, category descriptions, and product descriptions if that matters. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
ECommerce Website Internal Links
We run an ecommerce website... approx 8K products. When using the page grader, MOZ tools consistently tell me that I have too many Internal Links on the page.
On-Page Optimization | | Ampweb
These are caused from our fairly large menu system, and probably from the sub-category links on the category landing pages as well. I was reading an article that mentioned a no-follow on these Internal links would not really solve the "Too many internal links issue", so wanted to check if anyone has ideas or should I just dis-regard this MOZ suggestion that there are too many in this type of environment?0 -
Is this still considered true about INTERNAL anchor text? "Penguin seems to be targeting overly aggressive anchor text (both internally and externally), especially from low-quality sources."
Recently I've heard a few people say now it's okay to be aggressive with internal linking. So a link from mydomain.com/news to mydomain/widgets can use spammy anchor text like "best green widgets in California" that are an obvious problem for links coming in from external site. Which is accurate?
On-Page Optimization | | corlin0 -
Alt text / internal linking
Hi everyone A question about best practice when linking from pictures on our homepage - hirespace.com We have an option of using divs with background images (nicer in terms of design) but it means that we can't use anchor text or alt text to show Google what these internal links are about. The other option is to use images which do not allow us as much flexibility in terms of CSS but would allow us to use alt text. There is also an opinion that we should have separate text links at the bottom of the homepage to get the anchor page in. What is best practice in this situation - is alt text worth sacrificing some CSS flexibility for? How important is anchor/alt text for internal linking? Thanks guys.
On-Page Optimization | | HireSpace0 -
Ranked page is not desired page
I have a question on a problem I am currently faced with. There is a certain keyword that my employer wants to rank for. The good news is that sometimes it does rank in the top 5 pages of Google. (It drops in and out) The bad news is that it is going to a page that we need to keep, but not the ideal place we want people who are looking for that keyword to go to. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with this type of situation and what tactic they used to get people to the better page.
On-Page Optimization | | trumpfinc1 -
Would I be safe canonicalizing comments pages on the first page?
We are building comment pages for an article site that live on a separate URL from the article (I know this is not ideal, but it is necessary). Each comments page will have a summary of the article at the top. Would I be safe using the first page of comments as the canonical URL for all subsequent comment pages? Or could I get away with using the actual article page as the canonical URL for all comment pages?
On-Page Optimization | | BostonWright0 -
301 Re-directing a page
Hi, My website is appearing on page 1 of Google for a specific keyword, however when clicking on the search result, the page is out of date. As a short term solution, I have 301 redirected the url to a more up to date page on my website and beginning to optimise the on page content of this new page Is there any recommendations on what to do with the old page that appears on page 1 Google - as the page title, meta description and url displayed is out of date? Any help, best practise would be great...
On-Page Optimization | | simonsw0