Managing Inbound Anchor Texts
-
Hey all,
I have a web-shop selling server hosting and my home page has over 5000 inbound links from my customers.
My question is that most of these have the same anchor text to my homepage which links to my homepage META tags and a few keywords there. Is this good practice? Should the anchor text vary per customer and if so how?
I would say no as this is too difficult to manage and doesn't add to the 'user experience' if it does vary but always good to ask others!!
Also, as the customers aren't totally relevant to my own product (although the anchor text is) would this also be hurting my ranking?
Thanks
-
More often than not, you wouldn't be expected to have any particular influence over these inbound links - assuming they have come about naturally.
A popular site (which doesn't engage in illicit practices) will, over time, gain a high percentage of nofollow links (MOZ, for example has a split of around 60% nofollow/40% follow), the anchor text will vary, and usually links to a relevant page within the site i.e. the kind of anchor text you see across good quality blogs, which reference external sources/articles. A percentage of these inbound links will also be "naked" i.e. a straight hyperlink showing the URL in full. Expect to see a good few brand anchor text links, too (Moz). So, "good" sites, get a broad mix, of good/bad and indifferent anchor text links split between follow and nofollow.
Conversely, "bad sites" (who try to game the system) will have a disproportionately high number of exact match keyword anchor with an extremely high percentage being follow links, quite often from lower quality or irrelevant sites and they stick out a mile when you do any backlink analysis.
If you have any influence over this process it might help you get a better understanding of this by taking a good look at the backlink profile of a big player within your vertical (who is unlikely to need to try and cheat the system) in Open Site Explorer.
If you're not going out of your way to manipulate your rankings you should be able to let the anchor text links develop naturally, without concerning yourself too much about it.
So, in summary, "Should the anchor text vary per customer and if so how?"
Yes. You would expect to see it vary significantly, especially when spread from a broad range of sources and in numbers, as highlighted previously. Natural links look natural (you'll smell the bad ones a mile off!).
**As the customers aren't totally relevant to my own product (although the anchor text is) would this also be hurting my ranking? **
**No. **Not if they are out of your control, gained naturally, and vary in nature. Millions of links are created between sites of all different varieties, every day. The best ones will be from high-authority sites, often with some connecting theme - but that isn't essential - and that doesn't mean the lower-authority, unrelated sites are going to do you any harm whatsoever.
However, you wouldn't want to encourage everyone to drop an anchor text to your service in the footer of their websites, for example, because that isn't natural and will not be rewarded.
If you've got that many customers who are happy to link to you, you'd be wise to generate some great content and encourage them to engage with it - the kind of stuff they'd be keen to share, and others would be keen to read and you'll never have to concern yourself with your anchor text again.
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
-
Duplication content management across a subdir based multisite where subsites are projects of the main site and naturally adopt some ideas and goals from it
Hi, I have the following problem and would like which would be the best solution for it: I have a site codex21.gal that is actually part of a subdirectories based multisite (galike.net). It has a domain mapping setup, but it is hosted on a folder of galike.net multisite (galike.net/codex21). My main site (galike.net) works as a frame-brand for a series of projects aimed to promote the cultural & natural heritage of a region in NW Spain through creative projects focused on the entertainment, tourism and educational areas. The projects themselves will be a concretion (put into practice) of the general views of the brand, that acts more like a company brand. CodeX21 is one of those projects, it has its own logo, etc, and is actually like a child brand, yet more focused on a particular theme. I don't want to hide that it makes part of the GALIKE brand (in fact, I am planning to add the Galike logo to it, and a link to the main site on the menu). I will be making other projects, each of them with their own brand, hosted in subsites (subfolders) of galike.net multisites. Not all of them might have their own TLD mapped, some could simply be www.galike.net/projectname. The project codex21.gal subsite might become galike.net/codex21 if it would be better for SEO. Now, the problem is that my subsite codex21.gal re-states some principles, concepts and goals that have been defined (in other words) in the main site. Thus, there are some ideas (such as my particular vision on the possibilities of sustainable exploitation of that heritage, concepts I have developed myself as "narrative tourism" "geographical map as a non lineal story" and so on) that need to be present here and there on the subsite, since it is also philosophy of the project. BUT it seems that Google can penalise overlapping content in subdirectories based multisites, since they can seem a collection of doorways to access the same product (*) I have considered the possibility to substitute those overlapping ideas with links to the main page of the site, thought it seems unnatural from the user point of view to be brought off the page to read a piece of info that actually makes part of the project description (every other child project of Galike might have the same problem). I have considered also taking the subsite codex21 out of the network and host it as a single site in other server, but the problem of duplicated content might persist, and anyway, I should link it to my brand Galike somewhere, because that's kind of the "production house" of it. So which would be the best (white hat) strategy, from a SEO point of view, to arrange this brand-project philosophy overlapping? (*) “All the same IP address — that’s really not a problem for us. It’s really common for sites to be on the same IP address. That’s kind of the way the internet works. A lot of CDNs (content delivery networks) use the same IP address as well for different sites, and that’s also perfectly fine. I think the bigger issue that he might be running into is that all these sites are very similar. So, from our point of view, our algorithms might look at that and say “this is kind of a collection of doorway sites” — in that essentially they’re being funnelled toward the same product. The content on the sites is probably very similar. Then, from our point of view, what might happen is we will say we’ll pick one of these pages and index that and show that in the search results. That might be one variation that we could look at. In practice that wouldn’t be so problematic because one of these sites would be showing up in the search results. On the other hand, our algorithm might also be looking at this and saying this is clearly someone trying to overdo things with a collection of doorway sites and we’ll demote all of them. So what I recommend doing here is really trying to take a step back and focus on fewer sites and making those really strong, and really good and unique. So that they have unique content, unique products that they’re selling. So then you don’t have this collection of a lot of different sites that are essentially doing the same thing.” (John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trend Analyst at Google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=kQIyk-2-wRg&feature=emb_logo)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PabloCulebras0 -
Link with Anchor to header of the page: Keyword is ranking
I saw something interesting this week. I am doing research and spec-ing out a content page we are creating and one of our competitors "office Depot" on their phone repair page create exact match keywords that lead to an anchor that took you to the header of that pages. They were ranking first for all of those keywords with little to no links Thier strategy is the more local long tail that includes "near me" Have you guys ever seen this
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uBreakiFix
this is the URL: https://www.officedepot.com/a/content/customer-service/samedayrepair/ They are ranking for these keywords ( Top 3 nationally ) iphone 6 repair near me iphone 7 repair near me I am assuming that this is both due to their PA and DA authority shifting the authority to itself, but it does not make sense how they are lacking in a lot of SEO low-hanging fruits like H1/H2 keyword saturation, URL, Title Tag within this content page....Anyone up for discussing this?0 -
Unnatural inbound links message from Google Webmaster Tools!
Hi Everyone, I just got this message from GWT(image below) This is probably a penguin Penalty. What is clear is I have to find the best and most efficient way to tackle this issue. We will probably lose tons of traffic in the next couple of weeks so I would like to get the best suggestions and maybe a guideline on how to do this in the most effective way! Thank you! 1a0X2M2a1h0A
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Do inbound links from forums hurt our traffic?
We have a manual action against us on Google webmaster tools for unnatural links. While evaluating our back links, I noticed that forums with low page rank/domain authority are linking to us. Is this hurting us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imlovinseo0 -
Competitor using "unatural inbound links" not penalized??!
Since Google's latest updates, I think it would be safe to say that building links is harder. But i also read that Google applies their latest guidelines retro-actively. In other words, if you have built your ilnking profile on a lot of unnatural links, with spammy anchor text, you will get noticed and penalized. In the past, I used to use SEO friendly directories and "suggest URL's" to build back links, with keyword/phrase anchor text. But I thought that this technique was frowned upon by Google these days. So, what is safe to do? Why is Google not penalizing the competitor? And bottom line what is considered to be "unnatural link building" ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20101 -
Branded Anchor Text, Exact vs. Non-exact Match Domain
Hello, For NLPCA.com, when you search for "NLP California" in Google,the letters "nlp" are bolded in the SERP URL and so is "ca". See here. This is because "ca" is an abbreviation for "California" Thus, this is not an exact match domain but it is close. What should our branded anchor text be? I want to change the anchor text profile to 98% branded anchor text. The 3 names our company goes by are NLP California NLP Institute of California NLP and Coaching Institute Let me know if we should not use one or more of these names for branded anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Link Quality and Anchor Text
ok I was wondering how to determine the quality of a link and if there is a way to tell that the site linking to you could be passing on penalized link juice to your site. Also i would like to know some of yalls opinion on using anchor text links in articles and blogs. Now that google seems to have taken some of its "importance" away
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | daugherty0 -
Do backlinks with good anchor text from bad sites help?
Hi, In the Netherlands, the SEO competition for terms like loans is very competitive. I see a website in this industry that seems to be doing very well based on links with good anchor text from sites that seem quite worthless to me, such as: http://www.online-colleges-helper.com/ and http://www.alohapath.com/ My question is: is it worth pursuing this type of links? I assume these must be paid links, or am I wrong? I'd really rather not go down this route but I don't want to be outranked by someone who is using these types of links... Many thanks in advance for any type of insight! Annemieke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnnemiekevH0