Dillute My Anchor Text With Spam?

Interesting. I've seen a lot of links recently with "click here."

My first thought is to chuckle and think they are trying
to compete with adobe!

How about no anchor text at all, just the bare http: etc... ?

No question anchor text matters. For good or bad. If google
had ways of dealing with anchor text as a "signal," then it
makes sense they have ways to note the signal of spam.

I don't think anchor text alone can signal spam. It has to
be sheer numbers, the words chosen, as well as the location.
Putting up a bunch of blog comments could signal spam by
itself. And spammy anchor text, high up, in content, in
a very authoritative site would not.

Carol

Penguin appears to tackle link source i.e. spam and anchor text ratio's. It also appears to have a threshold - i'd tested a few sites with spam since penguin and up to a point the links increase ranking and then there comes a point where a limit is reached and the site falls sharply into obscurity.

Scott

Why is that going to work is the better question?

You were penalized for the 'wrong kind of links.' You'll be getting more of those type of links. Why would that 'dilute' anything.

It seems more likely that getting the right kind of links would be the way to go. However, you've ruled that out for your website.

Why not start a new domain? Your website can't be very valuable now that it's penalized. Starting fresh might yield you quicker results.

I know. I don't blame you for not wanting to give up revenue!

I think you should at least try your idea. Try some links without any surrounding text and also throw in "MyDomain.com" type branded links. If you're right that it's a ratio, you would bounce back.

If you roughly know how many links you already have, it should be fairly easy to reduce the ratio.

Very difficult to say when Penguin is gonna kick in and devalue all the links it suspects are spam. Domain age, other authority links, balance of high quality to low quality links etc etc may all play a part.

For example i started a new test site and created about 100 spam links. The site moved into position 1 for the targeted keyword which only had 500 exact searches a month. I kept pushing the spam and then bang! site not ranking in the top 100 pages of Google. Just out of interest I removed most of the spam and created a few quality links and the site started to move back up the SERPS.

It's almost link penguin gives you the benefit of the doubt when checking links until it's sure you're spamming than it ruthlessly devalues all the links which cause rankings to plummet.

I don't think it's a penalty like the Unnatural Links Notice we saw so much of before penguin because it's possible to regain rankings by reducing the spam and adding quality links.

Hope that helps.

Hi momo3,

i didn't dilute the spam or anchor text, i removed most of the spam links and added some quality links.

However, I think the Penguin trigger is probably affected by the ratio of high quality links to low quality links along with anchor text ratio and domain age etc. Every site, including 100% natural sites, have links in the profile that could be considered spam so I think ratio does play a part. Google will let a few spam links pass if you have some quality in the mix. Of course I don't know for sure but this is my guess.

The problem is most people have just been pushing out 1000's of spam links with over optimized money keywords which is very easy to detect.

I checked out the Warrior services section the other day and could hardly find a service that created a single quality link
Blog networks worked ok as they were not so easy to tag as spam but now they carry an even greater risk - the Unnatural Links Penalty.

My conclusion so far is to cut out the spam links and build link profiles and anchor text ratio's that mimic natural sites.

SEO takes more thought and care now.