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Should I rotate anchor text?

by Jacob Martus
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi everyone. Recently my rankings have been doing weird things. Dropping down to positions where I'm way behind sites with terrible quality and quantity of backlinks. Now, my backlinks aren't awesome by any means. But they are of the same quality as the sites that are now beating me out.

I've been noticing the more backlinks I build...the lower my site has been falling for those particular keywords. I'm starting to wonder if their is some kind of filter in the google algorithim for types of backlinks. I'd say my backlink profile is 70-80% profile backlinks and I'm not seeing any results from using profile backlinks anymore. My site just keeps on dropping.

I'm starting to wonder if because I keep getting more backlinks all with the same anchor text...all from profile type sites if there is some kind of filter...not necessarily hurting my rankings...but basically preventing anymore profile backlinks from having a positive effect on my site.

Should I vary my anchor text backlinks? I've read on several different threads that its not a good idea....to do so...but the more backlinks I add with this particular anchor text...the lower my site seems to fall.
#anchor #rotate #text
  • Profile picture of the author jasonbenfield
    The best thing to do is keep your focus on natural link velocity and diversity over quantity of backlinks.

    If 70-80% of your links are profile links, then you need to get a better variety of backlinks. If all most of your backlinks are coming through one method then it doesn't look like a 'relevant' site in the eyes of the search engines...

    Choose 4-5 different backlink stratgies that you haven't used before, or as much before and focus on those for a little...

    I WOULD recommend rotating anchor text but always having your primary keyword in the anchor text regardless...

    ie. if 'truck accessories' was your primary keyword, then I would have anchor texts that look like...

    truck accessories
    best truck accessories
    truck accessories reviews
    ect.

    After a LOT of testing, that's what personally worked for me best when I was handling an Offline Client with over 25 million competing sites...

    And they are now #2 up from 36... pretty good if I do say so myself.
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    • Profile picture of the author lolawanda
      Originally Posted by jasonbenfield View Post

      The best thing to do is keep your focus on natural link velocity and diversity over quantity of backlinks.

      If 70-80% of your links are profile links, then you need to get a better variety of backlinks. If all most of your backlinks are coming through one method then it doesn't look like a 'relevant' site in the eyes of the search engines...

      Choose 4-5 different backlink stratgies that you haven't used before, or as much before and focus on those for a little...

      I WOULD recommend rotating anchor text but always having your primary keyword in the anchor text regardless...

      ie. if 'truck accessories' was your primary keyword, then I would have anchor texts that look like...

      truck accessories
      best truck accessories
      truck accessories reviews
      ect.

      After a LOT of testing, that's what personally worked for me best when I was handling an Offline Client with over 25 million competing sites...

      And they are now #2 up from 36... pretty good if I do say so myself.
      Hi Jason thanks for sharing your successful strategy...I'll be implementing this tips on my linkbuilding campaign
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  • Profile picture of the author ramprof
    If most of your links are profile pages there is a good chance that Google does not even index them. So like Jason recommends you need to get backlinks from other sources (article sites, Web 2.0 sites, social bookmarking). And definitely vary the anchor text.
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    • Profile picture of the author Jacob Martus
      Well the backlinks are definitely indexed. The majority of them show up in backlink searches and even in my webmaster tools. Just I'm not seeing any amount of help from new profile backlinks. At first they were working wonders for me. I had #1 rankings on 3 different pages of my site. I think that was a combination of backlinks and that my website was new...but I stuck there for awhile...almost 2 months and suddenly my rankings have been steadily dropping...yet my backlinking has been continuing.

      Thinking about selling the website. I could probably fetch over $1000.00 for it...and start over having learned my lesson...not to overdue it with profile backlinks.
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  • Profile picture of the author Scott Rankin
    Jacob,

    Try to do two things.

    1) Diversify your link portfolio

    Having 80% profile links may not be such a bad thing until it effects your rankings in a negative way. Mix up some great content, bookmarks, articles, directories, and a few other methods... and not to fast either, slow and steady wins the race.

    2) Diversify your anchor text

    I don't mean having ten or twenty variations. Ideally, I like to have one keyword target per page and I rotate it with common words (the, and, etc) and plural and singular.

    Having both of these added to your SEO will greatly increase the chances of holding those top rankings. But remember, don't change your links overnight. Be as naturally as possible and do it over a month or two. I'm sure you'll secure that top spot!
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    • Profile picture of the author Jacob Martus
      Ok. Thanks for the input. The website in question is an affiliate site reviewing a certain set of products. So the anchor text variations are just different keywords people are searching for to find this product. Some of them don't keep the main keyword in the phrase...but they still warrant some backlinks because they are buyer oriented keywords.

      I'll stick with it and see where I get. Problem is...my earlier days in this I got marked on Akismet as a spammer. I don't know why I got flagged this way. Probably a webmaster that didn't think my blog comment was as relevant as it should have been and flagged it as spam. Problem is...now I get picked up by almost every spam filter when I try to post a comment. So that takes away the option to do blog commenting for backlinks...unless I hit the BlogEngineNet ones that are already 400 deep with links.

      I will write some articles and continue to add content to the website. Its about a 3 month old website with a new post having been added every single week.

      Do you think it might be a good idea to start backlinking some of my web 2.0 profiles? Like perhaps backlink the hell out of a squidoo lense thats pointing to my site?

      I've made a new site in the same niche and I'm going to take a very slow and steady approach to the backlinking for this new mirror site and see if I get better results. I will however be using my main site to link to this new website. That won't give me any problems will it? Some of the pages on the main site are PR 2....so I'm going to try and leverage that PR to make my new site get a little jump in rankings.

      I will definitely just stick with it...but it's hard to stay positive all the time when my site goes from 150 visitors a day to 48...and average time on site went down from 1 minute + to 7 seconds. The farther down page 1 you go...the worse my bounce rate and avg. time on site get.
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