Over the past year, we've seen a strange trend develop in the world of SEO: the rise of the “generic link.”
Generic links are bland phrases that avoid using keywords that search engines use to determine the context of what you are linking to. These include links like:
- “Visit website”
- “Read more”
- “Useful site”
- And, of course, “click here”
Google’s official SEO Starter Guide actually discourages webmasters from using generic links.
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Google published this guide in 2010. Is it still relevant today?
Why some SEOs use generic links
After Google rolled out their Penguin update and over-optimization penalties in 2012, many SEOs discovered that too much exact-match anchor text was now a bad thing. Research suggests that successful backlink profiles actually contained a wide variety of anchor text including exact match, partial match, URL links, and even nofollow links.
To compensate for over-optimized backlink profiles, SEOs started to “balance” their link profiles with generic anchors like “click here.” For some, the trick seemed to work, a little.
Recently, my wife’s site was attacked by a black hat spambot. Take a look at the bot's link distribution:
The profile was exactly 30% generic links!
Yes, it’s a huge improvement on using all keyword-rich anchors, but this also creates obvious patterns that any search engine could easily sniff out. It’s also evident these links were produced at scale in a non-editorial way.
As a result, these bots must build 1,000s of links to only rank a few days at a time.
We can do better
Aside from issues of usability, the reason Google advises folks to use descriptive words when linking is because this passes relevancy signals to the page you link to. If you link to this page with the phrase "SEO", search engines may determine this page is about SEO, and rank it higher in search results for that term.
In fact, there's evidence through various patent filings, and the experience of countless webmasters, that links using generic or off-topic anchor text pass potentially much less value than descriptive links.
- Bill Slawski, 10 Most Important SEO Patents, Part 5
Let's be clear: Google does likely devalue over-optimized anchor text, but there is no evidence anywhere of Google penalizing a website for not having enough generic “click here” links.
Instead, we should seek out links that enhance context and usability for not only our readers, but search engines as well. The best links are the ones where you don't control the anchor text, but in cases where you do control the anchor text, strive for variety.
1. Related text and Co-occurrence links
Instead of requiring exact match anchor text to achieve rankings, Google has proposed many methods of passing value through anchor text that don't require the exact keyword at all. One of these methods uses the idea of co-occurrence, documented here by Bill Slawski.
Put simply, search engines may judge relevance not only on the anchor phrase, but also on the "related phrases" found in both documents.
In Google's own patent example, the anchor phrase "Australian Shepard" is related to several other words:
Even though the second URL doesn't contain the words "Australian Shepard," it may still rank for this term if there are enough related phrases present. This helps closely related pages to pass more ranking relevance, while weakening unrelated anchor text (coincidentally, a lack of related phrases is how search engines fight Google Bombs).
2. Party at Synonym City
Search for "funny pics" and search engines return results for "funny photos" and "funny pictures" instead. This gives us several possible alternatives to exact-match links.
One great way to find synonyms is through using Google's tilde (~) operator. The tilde tells Google to "search for pages that are synonyms or similar to the term that follows."
When combined with other operators, such as the negative (-), this gives you a powerful keyword research tool. In the example above, the search query "~inexpensive -inexpensive" returns "low cost", "cheap," and "affordable." All are synonyms for inexpensive.
Use synonyms in your anchor text for greater meaning.
3. Partial match – Variation for the reader
A partial match anchor uses at least one of your main keywords, without using the whole phrase. Matt Cutts gives a hilariously bad example of how not to construct text. In short, what he describes is...
Consider this anchor text: “Best Car Accident Law Firm Fort Worth.” If we saw this on a page, we would cringe in embarrassment for the SEO.
Natural anchor text is not stuffed with keywords, but is instead useful for the reader while accurately describing what the text links to.
Better, more appropriate partial match anchors might include:
- “… meet Ben Shallot, an experienced attorney running Fort Worth’s most recognized law firm.
- "....the group of attorneys known best for their work with uninsured auto accidents.
- "...says he's leaving his firm after a disagreement with his partners.
Like anything else, partial match anchors can be abused quickly. Use with care.
4. Company names and brands
Company and branded names make great links when called up. People can link to SEOmoz, Molly Moon's Ice Cream, or Lava Lamp all day long!
However, be careful when your business name matches highly commercial anchor text, such as "Los Angeles Flowers," for example. In this case, there's almost no line between branded anchor text and over-optimized, exact-match anchor text. This might send confusing mixed signals to search engines - as if you're trying to game the system.
If you're a smaller company without much branded visibility, it might be best to stick to other methods until you can build your brand credibility.
5. Get personal with names
Dan Shure provides the next tip from his NoBoard SEO series: link to people.
People's names (like your CEO, for instance) are rarely overused. Dan suggests attracting named-based links by creating strong "about" and profile pages for people in your company.
Dan's best quote: "People like to link to people."
6. URL links
In general, URLs are NOT ideal anchor texts. They're non-descriptive, clumsy to write, and pass very few relevancy signals to search engines.
That said, it's possible to use URLs for perfectly normal reasons, such as when you describe changing a website address, i.e. "The new URL is https://moz.com." URL links don't always include the full address:
- www.seomoz.org
- seomoz.org/blog/top-tips
- seomoz.org
Although they don't pass few relevancy signals, URL links do offer marginally more value than generic anchors, so are offered here as a measure of last resort.
7. Link for the most important person - The reader
This post offers a number of linking examples, but for the most part the links flow as a natural part of the text, without artificial manipulation. The #1 priority of good content is not trying to outsmart the search engines, but creating usefulness and usability.
Shortcuts taken by scaling and repeating the same anchors over and over – even when they’re partial match or otherwise - are bound to get you in trouble.
Instead, craft each and every link you write to be as unique as the content holding it.
Ha! Thanks for using my video Cyrus. Since recording it, I'd thought of some other forms of unique anchor text;
These are all words or names totally created and unique to the company. I believe that having links like those, in addition to your brand name, domain name, "click here" etc can only help protect your site from an algorithm like Penguin which targets generic keyword links.
Helpful tips - loved the vid Jay McStevens!
lol - not sure where I came up with that. but I kinda like it ;)
Awesome suggestions - this is why they call you "evolving SEO"
Damn nice post. Cyrus especially thank you for "One great way to find synonyms is through using Google's tilde (~) operator." - it's additional way to find relevant search results for me!)
Absolutely! A site's backlink profile must have a mixture of anchor texts from naturally linked pages which the webmaster doesn't have any control of, generic anchor texts like click here etc, keywords along with a brand name as an anchor text, brand name alone, long tail keywords with variation of targeted keyword in it as anchor text etc., makes it an organic link profile. Not only anchor texts, which site it comes from, relevancy of the site providing the link back vs. the page/content receiving the link etc. is taken into consideration for rankings by Google.
Glad to know Mr cyrus. You provide such a wounderful info here.
A best way to get top ranking in google or any other search engine you have to create a natural linking to your site. If some one link to your site naturally mean you don't have directly ask or create a link to them, then its most powerful link then hand make links. If some one read our article and want to link to the article then its depend on the other person that what anchor text he want. So the best way to create good ranking is to create natural linking.
How do you say. ?
Cyrus,
You seem to be a bit down on URL anchor texts. :-)
From my perspective, though, they are (whether ideal for relevancy and the user or not) part of a natural link profile. For example: according to OSE, over 50% of the linking root domains to walmart.com use some form of "www.walmart.com" as anchor text. In my experience, URL anchor texts are a significant amount of any link profile where the anchor texts are chosen editorially/naturally. To put it another way, any link profile that doesn't include a significant number of URL anchor texts looks unnatural.
The same holds true with anchor texts like "click here" or "website" though to a lesser extent.
Hope to hear your further thoughts on this. :-)
Thanks!
~Adam
Adam - Thank you for the comment. It's not that I'm down on URL links (they still made the list) it's that they offer so much less value than other types of link opportunities.
Consider "nofollow" links. A healthy backlink profile contains lots of nofollow links. Walmart.com has 38,738,148 Million of them.
So why aren't SEOs rushing to build more nofollow links? (except in the case of local citation building) In part because they don't have to: if you are building natural links you probably already have a good amount of nofollow links. The other reason is nofollow links don't pass as much value.
So I included URL links on this list - they are still better than "click here" - but every time you build one you're passing up on an opportunity to create even better relevancy signals.
Thanks for the reply!
I think some SEOs are intentionally building nofollow links. I think that's a mistake, though. (Very broadly speaking) nofollow links are what you get when you are trying to build links, but the webmaster doesn't want to give you link juice. Editorially given links are more likely to be dofollow. Those are very broad generalizations, of course. So I really doubt Google will consider sites with more nofollow links as higher quality.
URL anchor texts are in a way, the opposite - they are one of the things you naturally get when you attract editorial links where you don't control the anchor text. You say that URL anchor texts offer less relevancy value than other anchor texts. I 100% agree, but I think that is the entire point of using them - it makes the link profile more natural, and less about keyword rankings. A link profile where most of the anchor texts are keyword/topically relevant is one that looks manipulated.
Based on the data I've seen, Google is penalizing sites based on over-use of keyword anchor texts. Using URL anchor texts seems to me to be the single most natural (i.e. it correlates with natural link patterns) way to keep your link profile from using too many keyword anchor texts.
As you say, URL anchor texts provide less keyword relevance, but from what I've seen, they correlate strongly with a natural link profile. Building a link profile without a significant number of URL anchor text links seems to me to be making your site an easy target - the statistical outlier.
Thanks again for your input. I think this is an incredibly important matter, and it's not something you can go back and change easily, so it's important to get it right the first time. :-)
I run the Link building campaign for my agencies website, I build most of our Backlinks from related Blogs that I'd be reading anyway, 90% of which are NoFollow and 100% have purely Unique content.
As ever, what we tend to get is people trying to standardise and emulate what should be a highly organic process.
If you consider writing a sentence and referencing some other content then you tend to just hang the anchor on the most fitting part of the sentence.
So, if I was writing a blog post and wanted to casually reference a couple of the known Penguin recoveries or effective use of the disavow tool I would have something like:
"Whilst there are not many, there are a few credible accounts detailing successful use of the disavow tool or recovery from penguin via link removal."
So, surely, whilst we may have the odd 'click here' or 'click to visit' what we really want is the widest possible array of anchors that are created in the natural flow of the text - much as is suggested in #7.
The best blogs that you read all link like this as it is natural to do so and useful for a reader and it is these blogs and articles that leave you with several tabs open as one article flows into several others.
Best for people = best for search engines.
Hi Cyrus - Nice follow up to your WBF. Do I need to worry about over-optimization of "internal" links between pages of my company website? Or is this mainly applicable to links coming from external sources?
I wish we had better data about internal anchors. That said, Google seems to treats them more stringent than external links, and this applies to over-optimization as well.
Yes, I wish we had more data on this too (no doubt Dr Pete will come up with some at some stage) because I find the whole business of over optimisation of internal anchors slightly paradoxical. Having decided what a page is about and what phrase best describes that page's subject (page title?), it seems perfecly natural to me to use the same anchor every time you refer to it. Even more so because it will often be the same person e.g. blog owner doing the referring.
Ewan - My thoughts exactly. I'd hope that Google doesn't penalize my internal links for accurately describing the destination page. I'm not doing obnoxious keyword stuffing but I am targeting relevant keywords and phrases in my anchor text. If that gets penalized or devalued then Google has lost their marbles.
Post Penguin/Panda, I have had internal pages drop like a stone because the -- internal -- links to them were over-optimised.So in my opinion, the answer is, sadly, yes.
But what about the many internal links to tag and category pages that WordPress produces all with exactly the same anchor text. Does Google differentiate between these structural ones and the ones that are placed in the content - as most CMSs do this.
2 in a row Cyrus, you've smashed it here.
It always amused/puzzled me that, in the wake of Penguin, people were proclaiming that we should use more "natural" anchor texts, of which "click here" was often included. OK, but tell me truthfully: when was the last time you linked to somewhere with "click here", and when was that done for the benefit of a user?
Just seemed so oxymoronic!
This post show some great alternatives and I love Dan's idea of linking to "brand associated terms", if you will. All of his examples above would produce links with text that is found on the brand's website, meaning that Google is likely to pick up the relevancy between the term and brand.
Let's stop using "click here". Unless you're these guys, but even they can't outrank Adobe!
Cyrus- Any thoughts about the "optimal" length of anchor text? Would longer phrases increase the chance of variation and thus reduce the chance of a penalty? Or do we dilute the value of an anchor text with every extra word or character?
Love this question! Maybe.... Yes.... Damn, I wish we had more data.
Roger? A little help from the Mozbot? Bueller?
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for explaining this.. After Penguin update, people started using "click here" sort of anchor texts in order to create a balance between exact match anchor texts, this post will help them to understand the concept of Anchor Text. I have seen many SEOs who misinterpreted the concept of varying anchor text, for example:
Keyword: SEO Services
Now, in order to "Vary" the anchor text, they will use "SEO Guidelines", "SEO Policies" and etc, etc... Important thing to understand here is that when Google says that excessive use of "Exact Match" keyword as an anchor text is unnatural, that doesn't mean that you will start using random anchor texts. As you quoted Bill Slawski , anchor text has to be relevant and sends out a relevancy signal.
I really hope that this post from you will help SEO community to understand the core concept of anchor text.
Thanks
Salik
Well said, Salik. IMO if anyone is synonymising (is that a word?) for the sake of getting the synonym rather than paying attention to what they're actually writing/saying, they're doing it wrong. Not only from a purely UX point of view, but if search engines get to a point where they're smart enough to ascertain the difference in context between "SEO Services" and "SEO Guidelines," then it'll potentially damage SEO efforts as well, as Google starts to wonder what the hell the page is actually about...
You could of course simply focus on the long tail...
Working from the bottom up by targeting long tail phrases first and head terms last generates a highly natural anchor text profile
So natural that quite often you will rank for your head terms with very little... if not none.. head term anchor text.
But then that would require convincing clients the value of long tail keywords :)
Only yesterday we had an SEO consultant (who was pitching his services) say that generic anchor text should be used exactly 33% of the time. His formula was 1/3 KW, 1/3 variations of KW, and 1/3 generic anchor text. Sounded fishy to me...
Google is very, very good at sniffing out patterns. If not today, then tomorrow. :)
Fear has kept the local systems in line! (sorry to those who hate Star Wars references) Penguin scared the hell out of SEO's and I think some of us (me at least) lost sight of the original purpose of anchor text as it pertains to signaling relevant content on a page. This post was a refreshing take on a topic that has been rehashed ad nauseum over the last year.
Good post for discussion points but I do think it's not always a simple, but surely it's easy to overdo it and go too far with "click here" backlinks and trip another future penguin algorithm.... I have a pretty good understanding of the backlink profile diversity of my clients and competitors and have seen some fairly interesting shifts in their linking behaviours and both positive and negative ranking changes due to their execution of said strategies...
When did all the useless comments that border on comment spam start? I could 4-5 comments that don't really add anything of use...
Thanks for the comment, David. I noticed that spam too. These days, it's almost a full time job anymore for staff members like Keri to keep these comments clean and useful, but they do a great job. It's a credit to the staff that a blog with this big of audience still has useful comments.
It is a tough job monitoring, and deciding if someone is truly spamming or just doesn't realize what they're doing is a bit outdated. We try to err on the side of being generous (while removing links), but I still ban several accounts each day.
The best way to alert us that something is amiss is to give a thumbs down to a comment.
"However, be careful when your business name matches highly commercial anchor text,"
I've actually been wondering about that for some time. I had a small client that took a little bit of a hit when Penguin went live (not enough of a hit that their business vanished but enough that we noticed) and I wondered if because their brand (which had been around for several years and was respected in their niche) was keyword rich that their anchor text profile looked a little spammy even when it wasn't. I did a major "under the hood" check of their website and couldn't pinpoint anything else that could have triggered Penguin so that was the idea I ran with.
Nick - I have been wondering about exact match domains too. My competitors all have very key word rich brand names. City Real EstateCity PropertiesCity RealtyBesides the obvious brand confusion among them, any guesses on what future algo updates might do to their SERPs. So far, they have been rewarded handsomely by the search engines.
Hello Geordie,
As long as your clients websites are getting new awesome content and back links, I don't think they are ever going to lose the game. Google normally punishes them who think that having keyword rich domains is enough to remain in good position in search results. No doubt Google is helping those domains for now but may kick off in coming updates if you don't focus more on quality work.
But, yes we can't also predict it 100% if Google will keep them happy or not but if Good work is there, they should be in top rankings, hopefully.
Lets just hope for best...if it's working good for now, it should work forever if you are good at what you are doing. Good luck!
You had me at 'Stop Clicking Here!' - great title and article
Brilliantly put, Cyrus. And yet I'm a little sad that it has to come to this - that we have to instruct SEOs that this is the way to go about getting a natural inbound link profile. It should've been obvious for a long time.
I've been getting partial match, name (both people and brand) mentions, generic and URL anchor text for clients since I started in SEO in 2009. Why? Because it was natural. Not just to users, but to search engines. Given that Google has some of the world's smartest working for them, it seemed obvious that punishing the over-optimisation of exact match anchor text would be the next step. We (as an industry) didn't need a bloody algorithm update to tell us.
To automatically counter it by simply going to opposite direction is ridiculous. I even know of one SEO professional who - no joke - said: "why don't we just get a ton of directory submissions or blog comments with the anchor text 'click here'?" It pains me that this fool is still in this industry... Talk about completely missing the point by about 100 miles...
If you're conducting a wide and varied link building strategy, you'll have your bases covered as far as anchor text is in concerned. Same goes for nofollow links, too (which I noticed Cyrus and Adam were discussing above - see from here onwards).
So if you're doing some (good) directory submission, you'll get brand anchor text. If you're doing blog comment, you'll get names/brands (and nofollow). If you're writing offsite articles and guest blog posts, then I suppose you can get some partial (or even exact) match anchor text, if you push your luck enough. Wikipedia will be a URL or something like a "[1]" (and it'll be nofollow). And so on.
At the end of the day, your backlink anchor text should naturally replicate the type of environment they're in. Every site (or type of site) is different; every method of obtaining links can (or will) result in a different type of backlink, whether it's 100% natural or sought after ("built") by an SEO's hands. Do a bit of everything, you'll get a lot of everything back. Focus on one area, and you'll get too much of a particular 'type' of anchor text. It's that simple.
As a complete aside - another one that bugs me is links for the sake of links, usually with internal linking (from internal articles/blog posts). So you'll have an article about SEO and in the first paragraph is a sly link to the homepage with the anchor text "SEO" - it's misleading because the link serves no purpose beyond SEO - your homepage isn't a page dedicated to the be-all-and-end-all of the topic of SEO, so don't do it. However, that said, something like "see our homepage for a list of our main SEO services" could work as it makes more sense overall. It needs to be contextual to the landing page (as Cyrus mentions above).
Phew... That'll do for now. :-)
Hours later and I've found an incredible (and really baffling) example regarding the last paragraph: case in point.
"one SEO professional who - no joke - said: "why don't we just get a ton of directory submissions or blog comments with the anchor text 'click here'?""
Unfortunately, I've heard rumors that kind of stuff can actually work to get out of a Penguin penalty. Of course, it's a spammy hack, so there's a pretty good chance Google will update or add an algorithm to catch that type of stuff in the future.
That's the problem - it will work - from a current standpoint and a purely algorithmic point of view. While I'd hope that some directories and blog owners would not allow such anchor text as part of their rules or spam filtering, I guess there'll always be exceptions that spammers will feed on...
Nice post Cyrus. I have noticed the click here anchor text trend as well. URL links are often used in "attracted links" that are from real people with non-SEO intentions. That is why having your keywords in the URL (does not have to be in the domain) can help with relevancy signals, especially if those words are relevant, descriptive and include your target keywords. Also, the context of the link in terms of nearby/surrounding text and its relevance to the destination should not be underestimated. Thanks for sharing.
I would use keywords in the URL not only to get relevancy signals, but also to get better rankings, as Google ranks keyword rich URL-s better.
Yes, exactly.
Hi Cyrus,
Very happy to see that you covered this topic on Anchor Text on Image. When I checked the anchor text of my competitors via OSE I found out that most (atleast 75% in total links) of them are using their brand name as their anchor text. I re-read your this sentence If you're a smaller company without much branded visibility, it might be best to stick to other methods until you can build your brand credibility which totally suit to us. We are not yet brand but I hope we can use some other variants for anchor text untill we became one of the brand name.
Thanks.
Thx so much for all the tips (and including the video). I like the idea of linking to the about me page. Also, this just reinforces the need for diversity of links.
And, you made me realize that there are several times where I've linked to specific blog posts and used the title of those posts...but I prob. need to mix that up a bit more as others prob. wouldn't use my exact titles. At times, I've mixed it up, but probably not enough. (But thankfully, there are not a ton of these links, only a few).
Funny how we as SEOs try to figure out the most natural way to do SEO and then call it natural. :)
Great post Cyrus. I always enjoy your thoroughness and practical tips.
Though there are different thoughts about the Anchor Text. I am reading articles that says if we use the same anchor text for the links we post, Google will consider them as too much optimization. Is it True?
Hi Cyrus,
I wonder that how did you solve "black hat spambot" matter. Are there still spam bot attacks ?
Thanks for your post.
What do you mean by "black hat spambot" ?
I agree you need to be more smart with the way you link content, it is important that you diversify the anchor text.
I agree with the comments above about URLs been a good strategy too link too, I've been doing a whole heap of research into that area recently and yes it is evident that URL based links seem to be a very popular trend with the general public.
further to this I would also count people linking to the percentage of pages, you see many SEO companies thinking about just linking to the home page as say 50%, I would not think this is wise at all moving forward, I would look for a deep linking strategy 100% to future proof your link profile.
Great post about the anchor text. (Great video too). I like the idea of using the brands formal names, especially for small businesses where it's just one or two people in the company. It's really a great idea, since this "person" is pretty much leading the company anyways.
Brilliant! After the Google changes-Panda & Penguin, I've been very leery about my anchor text links. These give me more was to express the link.
Thank you.
Great advice, especially personal names and brandable items. Though co-occurrence is what I suspect will be valued the most as time goes by. Interesting how all of these "SEO" techniques rely heavily on content creation alone. Of course if we have the control over the anchor text, that is.
thx for another nice post Cyrus. Shared it on twitter and allready got reactions from people over here in The Netherlands.We see quit the same thing in Europe BTW so it was indeed a good input and helpful.
Gr. Hans
Thanks for clearing about the usage Generic keywords. I have seen some sites which do get benefits and neutralize their exact match anchors. but also never been through a site which being penalized for not using generic keywords. I think i should avoid it :)
Hello Cyrus
Thanks for explaining very well the concept of anchor text. SEO masters started using various generic links including blend phrases which avoid exact match keywords after penguin update.
It is really useful for SEO community to understand the core concept of anchor text.
Thanks!
Ajay
Cyrus,
After recent Google Updates, various traditional seo techniques have gone and you have described all those lost techniques in an effective way. Because of latest updates, SEO Professionals are really confused specially about the anchor text, i hope this article will help them to find out the loop holes on their SEO Strategy. I totally agree with your post as i am working on the same strategy since last few months and i got that none of my website is effected by the latest Google updates.I prefer this article to all those SEO Professionals who are wondering to get back their lost ranking. You have done a great job Cyrus.
Something like Justin Bieber wets the bed would be a good keyword drop. I know I've mentioned this before on some other comments but, really, Justin B. doesn't get criticised enough.
Great post though, thanks Cyrus. I like to be creative with keywords and try to avoid sticking them in with a banal piece of business spiel. "Great value every thyme, come and shop at Shops 'R' Us as we're the best!"
Justin Bieber wets the bed? No comment. :)
Great post Cyrus and some great points. It simply comes down to laziness on the part of SEO's - driving traffic through an acquired link should always be a focus.
I really think it's time to stop nitpicking Google's algorithm. Rather than spending valuable time trying to game the algo by not gaming it, spend it on the creation of valuable content that will target the audience you want to engage. It's not about total visits; it's about the quality of visits and conversion. The point that Google has been making for over a decade is that content is not meant to be gamed. If you want to game your online presence use PPC campaigns. Leave SEO to content creators who understand how to create value for their visitors. This all becoming so much BS!
Snippet, I feel your frustration. I'm a huge advocate of "attracting links" - not building them. But even then, in the normal course of SEO, you often run into situations where you do, in fact, control the anchor text linking to you. And as an SEO, we want to also do this in a useful, engaging way for our visitors.
There's lots of bad information out there, and this post was an attempt to help steer folks back in the direction utility and value.
All good thoughts Cyrus, thanks for getting them out there.
I'd like to make the case for stopping "Read more" as anchor text for internal links. It's bad usability and misses out on the (admittedly small) bonus of the title of your article as an internal link.
Can't imagine to see the title of the post again in read more link. You already have them in post title. I think google is smart enough to attribute the second link to the post as read more.
Hi Cyrus, its feel like this post is a part of your previous white board Friday. Great examples about using a variety of anchors or phases while building links to make a natural link profile. I think descriptive anchors are most powerful signal than others because these kinds of anchors describe best to users and search engines about the linking page. And I totally agree that by using too much generic links you are wasting your link building effort and are not getting any SEO value from those links.
I'd recently read the an article (from Noble Samurai, a trusted source) suggesting the ratio of keywords should be;
Although I prefer the numbers you have offered, it goes to show the discrepancy in the numbers...
Dan
Thanks for the insights! You pointed out some great ways to diversify anchor text while at the same time keeping those links natural. I'm especially interested in Dan Shure's tip about creating name-based links. I'm definitely going to try this out soon. I'll be sure to find some quality synonyms next time I'm link building as well.
Awesome Suggestions.
I hate to drop the grammar hammer but you wrongly spelled the first word - ove - of this illuminating guide. This is good to know in Panda ecosystem and Author Rank coming down the pike.
From an SEO stand point its silly to work on a project and at the end not optimize it for a relative high traffic keyword. It seems like a huge waste of time to use generic keywords like “here” or “click here.” Especially if you are writing a guest post or original unique content that may be shared around the web leading to traffic.
Just a note: "Google’s official SEO Starter Guide actually discourages webmasters from using generic links" for inner-link (i.e. interlinking of your own websites), no explicit indication was given for inbound links. I think in general that also "click here" anchors with reasonable distribution could be taken into account for a good link profile :)
Hi Cyrus Great post now days search engines are smarter then they were we should strategies our Seo campaigns more manipulative and diverse with good mix of Do-follow, No-follow, anonymous contexts and definitely the Anchor text. That's How ball will stay in your pocket.
Fantastic post. Thanks for sharing these
I wrote a post expanding on this, looking at 101 non brand anchored external links in articles. I discounted guest posts/sponsored posts and posts that promoted a product to get a natural profile of how people really link out to content when a keyword isn't the focus.
https://www.goddardseo.com/blog/a-look-at-101-genuine-natural-external-links
Awesome suggestions Cyrus, I've now been using this since this article was 1st published - I honeslty thought I'd left on a reply but it looks like I have yet to leave 1.. Maybe my Net DC'd or something REALLY REALLY important happened.
Anyway, great article Cyrus and I'll continue to use these instead of so called "generic anchor text".
i get confused,google keep changing there way they wrank websites,so i joined this site to learn and try understand how seo really works,there is a lot more to it than i thought,i found out it is not much backlinks you have but the quality of them
Valuable post and worth reading for everyone doing marketing regardless mode of marketing.
It can be hard to mix all this kind of anchors keywords, tool like https://kisseotools.com help us to do this job
Thanks for sharing genuine information..
Thanks!
https://dlvseo.com/category/spanish-seo/ Is it a example?
Thanks for all the different ways to mix up the use of anchor text...nice info..thanks before
I Love this post.Thanks for sharing...
Very insightful post, It's true the C-suite will probably continue to request ranking reports, and the like -- this is where it becomes important for SEO to educate. If the C-suite is on the side of SEOs, company wide support for the correct initiatives will likely follow. Thanks for the great analysis of worthy SEO tools!
Thanks for the insights. I am just learning how to promote and while it might be working it sure doesn't feel like it is. Until about a month ago my website was full of click here's and read mores.
There may be many techniques to create links like using anchor text, many variations and may be brand name, personal name and using direct urls also.
Make sure you are making natural links only, not going to create spam links, each links have their own intention.
Useful Tips.The link drops on unnecessary and wrong place are not beneficial and also creates the problem.
I totally agree about unnecessary link drops. At SEOmoz, comments with link drops go into moderation, and then staff either remove the link from the comment, delete the comment, or delete the comment and ban the user.
pretty good article. this process really helps in building anchor text according to competition. Thanks for share your article with all of us.
Great Blog post yet again Cyrus, i'm glad to see your giving out so much juicy information/content to my thirsty mind!I'd also like to add that making sure the website itself is as relevant as possible..It's all good having a great unique article that provides everything about your business and what you want to rank for, but it means jack-s$%t if you've posted to a Automotive Website in New Mexico when your trying to sell flowers in London..I still haven't seen anything recently about related websites, i've built entire campaigns around blog commenting just on related websites, even though most people saying "comment spam is bad" - it can be truly effective if it's a related website with good juice itself!
Great post to read at the end of a busy week. It is even better when it supports many of the linking practices that I already use. Love that example of link spam from Matt Cutts.
Awesome Suggestion.. Thanks Cyrus...
Thank you Cyrus we will pass this article along. Not sure why people believe they can get one past Google.
Great post, it is interesting how seo is changing. Looking back it makes me realise just how simple seo was and just how complicated it is becoming! Great points though.
Thanks for sharing the stats on the spam bot... that is helpful
Great post Cyrus !!! Thanks for Writing…
As we know Google Penguin targets if website is over optimized with generic keyword links. In that case links on keywords like “Click Here”, “Watch the Video”, “Read More”, “Company Name” etc can help great to protect a website from Google Penguin algorithm penalty.
Isn't the point that you can just as easily avoid Penguin penalties by using relevant but varied anchor text?
Yes, exactly !!!
Thanks for all the different ways to mix up the use of anchor text. I find 2. Party at Synonym City seems like a good way to work around the over-optimized. From experience from reading all these SEO articles, I find linking very long tail keywords work too. More descrptive and definitely won't over-optmize since you won't be using the same very long tail keyword all the time.
Thanks Cyrus, after the anchor text variation concept people started varying in a spammy way like i saw numerous SEOs using best, top etc anchor text as variation . Your post really help us to understand the concept of anchor text variation.
Create real content, deliver real value, communicate to real people ... makes sense to me. I appreciate the care you took preparing this post. Its one thing to tell people what to do but another thing entierly to show them how to do it.
Great to actually read and in-depth article about anchor text. I always read "you want more click heres" or "more keywords". Thanks, great post!
"Party at Synonym City" —count me in!
Is that on the opposite side of the antonym area?
@Cyrus Shepard Is this bit an experiment or something?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1orMXD_Ijbs&feature=youtu.be&t=1m2s
It's like a Rick Roll, but sooooooo much better.
Hello, this occurring in Brazil a Challenge SEO, positioning for a keyword on Google. I'm participating, and I have followed your posts, to use the tips and techniques in the contest. Thanks for the information! If you can help me with more tips and if you want to know more about seo challenge. Visit my website! https://www.brasilito.com.br
Good tips
I like this article and found it extremely informative but you've spelled "accurately" wrong.
Fixed! Thanks for letting us know.
In Google’s official SEO Starter Guide are given all the necessary guidelines that should be followed and results will not fail.
Let me know how you get on with that!!! Something says you might just struggle....
I'm Really very happy to read this kind of very informative and very useful post. I would like to thank you for share your knowledge with all of us.
Actually any kind of links created by an SEO will be penalized in today or tomorrow. Only those websites will not be penalized by search engine which are fulfilling people's need and people click on them naturally.
Great to hear some sanity in the whole subject of gaming SEO by not gaming. Have we lost our minds as to what the value of a site and what useful, engaging content actually is?
The article is really informative
Thanks Micheal!
Yes, now updating latest Google update quality content is major impact in Search Engine.