The balance of (or lack of it) in your website's backlink anchor text seems to be an important component of the penalties associated with Google's Penguin update. For some website owners having top money keyword heavy backlink ratios - and not enough Brand, naked URL and Generic anchors could be a toxic combination.
Over at mac-seo-tools I blog about a new feature at MajesticSEO that graphs out a quick and dirty pie-chart of some of your back links and how they're anchored. You also have the option of generating a Top-10 anchor report (with free account) - or more detailed anchor text ratio reports with a paid subscription.
Clearly Google is favoring Branding and raw URL's of your domain, money keywords less so, and apparently really oddball, generic, supposedly naturally occuring things like 'this site', 'here', 'this page', 'this blog post' that someone ELSE might link back to your site with are best done with an even mix.
From my own websites dinged by Google, many top keywords with commercial intent that were disproportionately anchored are now terms with a -50, -100 penalty choking off traffic to the phrases searchers are most likely to use. In effect, the anchored links said the site was about X/Y/Z -- therefore Google no longer ranks them well for X/Y/Z -- because accurately keyworded links are pointing to content that is also about X/Y/Z. "You said you wanted it. So now you can't have it."
Visit MajesticSEO and check how some of your websites - or your competitor's anchor text ratios and diversity compare.
Clearly Google is favoring Branding and raw URL's of your domain, money keywords less so, and apparently really oddball, generic, supposedly naturally occuring things like 'this site', 'here', 'this page', 'this blog post' that someone ELSE might link back to your site with are best done with an even mix.
From my own websites dinged by Google, many top keywords with commercial intent that were disproportionately anchored are now terms with a -50, -100 penalty choking off traffic to the phrases searchers are most likely to use. In effect, the anchored links said the site was about X/Y/Z -- therefore Google no longer ranks them well for X/Y/Z -- because accurately keyworded links are pointing to content that is also about X/Y/Z. "You said you wanted it. So now you can't have it."
Visit MajesticSEO and check how some of your websites - or your competitor's anchor text ratios and diversity compare.
Hi! Glenn,
ReplyDeleteDo you know of an Anchor Text Ratio Tool for a PC?
Thanks,