Backlinking ... TELL ME THE TRUTH!!

13 years ago

Here's the thing. It has been shown that having at least a solid proportion of your links with the exact anchor text you want to rank for is very strongly correlated with ranking well in Google.

But, there are two different schools of thought unfortunately.

One, which apparently includes the video you watched, is sort of the old, more established "school." That school tends to favor natural link building, and as such, to them natural link building by definition would include varied anchor text links (as well as some without any anchor text).

Now, there is a different school, that I happen to be a part of :rolleyes:, as well as some other around here like Terry Kyle. This is based upon my own personal experience and testing it on my own site. My conclusion? Natural linking patterns are not needed. In fact, if I have a site that I want to rank for "dog training trainer", I have had the best success going after only that exact keyword phrase as the anchor text, with as little variation as humanly possible. "unnatural"? Sure, but it works. People can say Google's algo should detect such unnatural linking and not reward it, but that is "should" and in my experience it doesn't play out in the real world.
Now, if some human at Google ever sat down to look over your page's link portfolio would they be like "what the hell?"? Yep. But, the odds of that are between slim and none.

Tom

Originally Posted by Mangozoom

Hey people

I am in education mode at the moment and aiming to become an SEO expert. You may or may not know that I am doing really well with Article Marketing, however I am trying to increase my skill set (not least because I am winning some offline SEO clients).

I have been studying backlinking and watched a video today that raised a question which I could do with some help on.

Here goes

If you are after ranking for a particular keyword ... let's say 'dog training methods'. Is it sensible to keep building lots of inbound links just using that exact phrase or will Google see it as not being natural.

Just to put this into context I am trying to rank for a number of keywords and only build 5 inbounds a day using high quality blogs.

Alternativley should I vary the keywords 'methods for training puppies' as this video suggests ... although this does not feel accurate to me as how will I ever rank for my target keyword?

If you KNOW the answer because you are an SEO expert I would appreciate your reply.

Thanks in advance

John

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bgmacaw

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Now, if some human at Google ever sat down to look over your page's link portfolio would they be like "what the hell?"? Yep. But, the odds of that are between slim and none.

The odds of such a manual review increase considerably when you're suddenly ranking for certain products and services in highly competitive and lucrative niches or for other reasons (such as the STFU penalty). But, for the average site, it isn't really likely to happen.

One thing that varying your anchor text can help with is ranking for various related long tail terms. For example, if I'm already ranking for "dog training methods" I might want to add links for the following long tails too...

hunting dog training methods
puppy training methods
dog potty training methods
crate training methods
dog house training methods
dog training methods differences
dog training techniques
police dog training methods

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Mangozoom

13 years ago

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

One thing that varying your anchor text can help with is ranking for various related long tail terms. For example, if I'm already ranking for "dog training methods" I might want to add links for the following long tails too...

hunting dog training methods
puppy training methods
dog potty training methods
crate training methods
dog house training methods
dog training methods differences
dog training techniques
police dog training methods

Got to say instinctively this feels right ... again I have no personal data to support it.

By the way what is an STFU report?

John

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Jacob Martus 13 years ago

Originally Posted by Mangozoom

Got to say instinctively this feels right ... again I have no personal data to support it.

By the way what is an STFU report?

John

The STFU penalty is reserved for people who are bragging, teaching, or promoting something that Google doesn't want the whole world doing. Here's an example:

You start a case study to show how using an exact match domain with 1 page of content and adsense is an easy way to make bank. The site is real low quality and isn't exactly the model for what Google wants in its search results. Then, your case study gets a ton of attention from other people making it "famous". People start to talk about your case study and it gets spread around all the top SEO/marketing forums and people start to do the same thing. In this case, it's easier for Google to just slap the f*ck out of your site so that anyone thinking it was a good idea thinks twice.

Basically if you're doing something kind of shady and it's working really well, just keep quiet about it and don't tell the whole world. If you do tell everyone, and whatever you're doing gets a lot of attention, you may get a STFU (Shut The F*CK UP) penalty.
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The Expert 13 years ago
I believe that there is value in both approaches so I split my link building strategy this way:

65% Backlinks Get Anchor Text
- Of this slice of the pie, about 3/4 of them get the exact term I'm looking to rank for.
- The other 1/4 of them get a very slight variation of the term.
30% Backlinks Get URL
- The fact of the matter is that most links on the internet simply are not "anchored" except by bloggers how are in the know....everyone else will just copy and past the long URL link directly into whatever they are publishing with the result being that the URL itself becomes the anchor text. So if your site is h^^p://JohnHeartsCars.com then a good portion of your links should be that exact URL. This is one of the reasons why it's nice to have your targeted keyword phrase as your domain name (or at least contained in it) because then you get the benefit of both worlds when just linking your URL.
- This also seems to play out naturally because there are a lot of sites that I find when doing things like profile linking which will not allow you to specify anchor text anyway...so you just end up scoring URL only links on those sites. It's like forced natural link building.
5% - Nonrelated Anchor Text
- when I hunt for High-PR comment linkns I can often find pages where the actual page (not the root domain) has a PR of 5,6, 7, or even 8. When I scan the page I identify that the only links being given are those attached to the commenter's name and that the only names which appear in the comment section are "real" names (e.g. "Joe" not "Disney DVDs") which gives the impression that comments are being approved but only for "real" commenters, not link builders. A PR7 page will pass so much link juice that it doesn't matter so much what anchor text you score. For these situations I always have an "About Me" page created on my site (hxxp://MySite.com/about-me/) which I can link my name to on these hot comments pages. I get the PR7 link juice to pass from the comment page to the About Me page and then it is filtered through to my other pages via the internal link structure of this About Me page. This does not happen often, but you never want to pass up the change to earn a true PR7+ link.
That's really the only variety that I toss in there.
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Andy Kobe

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

if some human at Google ever sat down to look over your page's link portfolio would they be like "what the hell?"? Yep. But, the odds of that are between slim and none.

Tom

Tom,

Could you clarify how you determine the odds of having a site manually
reviewed?

Thanks.

I just ask because your statement suggests that you know something
that I may not know in terms of what brings a specific site to the desk
of a manual reviewer at Google.

Andy

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Tom Goodwin

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Andy Kobe

Tom,

Could you clarify how you determine the odds of having a site manually
reviewed?

Thanks.

I just ask because your statement suggests that you know something
that I may not know in terms of what brings a specific site to the desk
of a manual reviewer at Google.

Andy

Unfortunately I don't have some big secret info on it. I mean, Google's webspam team is relatively small, so they can only look at so many sites.

Not including Adsense related matters....

As bgmacaw noted, it would seem to me that only real risk typically occurs when when your site starts ranking at the top of Google for very lucrative keywords. Then your competitor gets angry, and submits a webspam report to Google. Or, some SEO site like seomoz does an article about how your site is ranking based upon spam links, and then that gets trickled down. IMHO, the webspam reports are not very likely to do anything though, as there are so many of them, and so few on the webspam team, and Google has even stated that the real purpose of the reports is to help better google's algo, rather than taking specific action against offending sites. So, it would seem to me the only real risk is if someone actually has some direct contact with someone at google. Say, someone is Matt Cutt's golfing buddy or something

Then there is the adsense thing though. It is pretty clear that sites with adsense get monitored more closely. It is generally perceived that Google tends to check a person's adsense site portfolio once they start making significant money (i've heard $100/day thrown out there..but that is just some number someone made up). Now, typically I would assume they would just check the content of the sites to make sure they aren't MFA sites, and that there aren't any violations of the Adsense TOS. Now, if something looked really fishy could they look at backlinks too? Perhaps, I really don't know on that.

Tom

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Andy Kobe

13 years ago

Thank you for the reply.

I guess I'm gathering that the advice laid out in threads like this in terms
of backlinking really depend on the person's business model:

a) For sites under the radar, your backlink advice is solid.

b) For a site that someone wants to rank for lucrative keywords over
time, develop authority in the search engines, and uses Adsense, then
play it safe.

Would you say this is somewhat on target with your suggestions?

Andy

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Tom Goodwin

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Andy Kobe

Thank you for the reply.

I guess I'm gathering that the advice laid out in threads like this in terms
of backlinking really depend on the person's business model:

a) For sites under the radar, your backlink advice is solid.

b) For a site that someone wants to rank for lucrative keywords over
time, develop authority in the search engines, and uses Adsense, then
play it safe.

Would you say this is somewhat on target with your suggestions?

Andy

I think that's fair, with one caveat. For more lucrative keywords, I think you can still do some thinks like some unnatural link building, etc., but I would make sure to have a good mix overall to even things out and as you start actually ranking well transition to more of a natural pattern.

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yukon Banned 13 years ago

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- bgmacaw 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by yukon
  
  If your ranking #1 for "above ground pools", I doubt very much you'll see as many bad eyes looking at you & your site.
  
  Check out the links on the site ranking for that term (as I see it anyway) poolsaboveground.com.
  
  Who says reciprocal links don't work...
  
  And check out some of those other interesting things going on with their links.
  
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  yukon Banned 13 years ago
  
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  bgmacaw 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by yukon
  
  How about all those PR8 apache backlinks.
  
  It goes back to something I've said many times, if you want to know what works well in SEO, don't take the word of some "SEO expert" on it, just do a little investigating of site that rank well, see what they're doing and see if you can do the same.
  
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  bgmacaw 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by yukon
  
  Seoquake must be messed up, I checked another pr-tool & that site has PR5.
  
  I'm showing PR5 so I guess SEOQuake screwed up for you. It will do that sometimes when it can't pull in info for one reason or another.
  
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SoundsGood

13 years ago

Good stuff, Tom!

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Mike Anthony

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Mangozoom

If you are after ranking for a particular keyword ... let's say 'dog training methods'. Is it sensible to keep building lots of inbound links just using that exact phrase or will Google see it as not being natural.

Bottom line is there is not much data I have seen that support mixing. There may very well be something to it in Google's algorithm but practically with an aging site its not even very likely that you will continue to have only the anchor text you put down. usually at some point someone else links to you with other keywords and breaks the unnatural look anyway

Now I DO often mix but that's not because I have consideration for looking natural but because in a lot of keywords I go for there are other variation keywords that I want as well.

Besides from programming standpoint this would be hard to really make a major factor. Are you going to write an algorithm that is going to penalize Burger King for having too many links referring them with those keywords? What other anchor text would you likely use? For some terms its completely natural for the anchor text to have little variation and a programmer doesn't want the hassle of going through Human usage and determining which ratio is more natural for each term.

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Jordan Kovats

13 years ago

I have found that the shorter tail phrases you go after, you end up picking up the long tail stuff along the way. One of my sites, I went after 3 terms. I am being found now on 200 terms. All 3 terms were 2 word phrases. 13 months ago, that site was being found on 1, maybe 2 terms, and that was the company name. That was before any SEO was applied to it.

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Tom Goodwin

13 years ago

Originally Posted by theseoguys

I have found that the shorter tail phrases you go after, you end up picking up the long tail stuff along the way. One of my sites, I went after 3 terms. I am being found now on 200 terms. All 3 terms were 2 word phrases. 13 months ago, that site was being found on 1, maybe 2 terms, and that was the company name. That was before any SEO was applied to it.

That has been my experience as well. Go after the shorter type phrases and as long as the other keywords (in some combination) are somewhere on the page, I can often pick up good rankings for those with zero anchor text links for them.

Tom

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facetheace

13 years ago

interesting thread, in my case i've merged two top keywords i want to optimize for: online poker and poker in india. I'm not sure though if this is the best anchor link text, would having just Poker or Online Poker be better? thanks for the help

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Mangozoom

13 years ago

Hahaaahaa haa .... STFU!

A new acronym for me!

We used to say that certain peoples details should go in the WOFT File ... Waste Of F$%$ Time

Will get back on topic now ... thanks for the posts so far really good reading

John

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ToyBox

13 years ago

personally I would recommend picking a few main anchor text key phrases that you will use for the bulk of your linking. You could pick some other random anchor texts to throw into the mix IF you are paranoid about it.

I don't feel it will hurt you too much, otherwise folks could really screw with the competition.

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Backlinking ... TELL ME THE TRUTH!!

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