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Huge Question about Over-Anchor Optimization...

by The Oilman
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
OK here is my question.

Lets say you had a weight lifting site. You ranked #1 for weight lifting.

But you were overoptimized for weight lifting as your anchor.. and on the 24th, you got hit by penguin. Your weight lifting term went to page 5. Sad day.

However, you've now dilluted your anchors and brought authority to the site... and you're back on page one for weight lifting, but not quite at the top, where you want to be.

Here is my question:

If you want to build more links for weight lifting, is it ok to have broad match terms.. as long as its not exact match?

So can I make links that say:

weight power lifting
lifting weight
pro weight lifting tips

etc.?

Or will those still cause harm?

Also, another question: Lets say I acquire a few high PR sites. Do you think its ok to drop the anchor on those sites and try to delete the weight lifting anchor from other sites? Or, since they are from high PR, will they trigger the filter MUCH more?
#huge #optimization #overanchor #question
  • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
    Generally speaking no it won't harm you as you are diversifying your anchors but remember this:

    Every link you build will dilute your brand terms. So if you have 100 links and 30% are brand terms like: example.com + www.example.com + example - your ratio will them become 29% and so on..

    While building links it is quite hard to stick to solid rules, but you need to set these for yourself and stick to them.

    It may even be tempting to point your most powerful links at your site with you main keyword, but I would do it differently, pointing the best links to my brand, and link diversitiy to my keyword + mixture of keywords, split 30/30% and not forgeting my internal pages.
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  • Profile picture of the author The Oilman
    So are you saying that on the high PR sites -- you'd use your brand.. and on your junkier links you'd use more anchors?
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    • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
      Originally Posted by The Oilman View Post

      So are you saying that on the high PR sites -- you'd use your brand.. and on your junkier links you'd use more anchors?
      I would just be careful and really mix it up, pointing loads of good quality links at your keyword could spell disaster. You need good link diversity anyway so just make sure you have enough lower pr links across wide ip base and possibly 10% good links to your keyword and 10% to your brand. If you can stick to a rule like this then you should be OK.. Generally speaking a sites ranking ability doesn't come from loads of quality links to a keyword, it has brand strength and good internal linking which, benefits the site's main keywords.. The first high pr link I built to my site was for the brand keyword and I will continue this for the next few weeks making sure the majority of the best links are hitting my branded terms.
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  • Profile picture of the author The Oilman
    Hmm.
    Its complicated.
    But you seem really smart.. I appreciate it.


    What are your thoughts on being more agressive with anchors when internal linking ? I took a lot of this internal linking off after penguin hit.. but part of me thinks G will be more lenient on it... mainly because offsite there is probably less keyword anchor linking than we think... but onsite it makes sense to use it.. thoughts?
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    • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
      Originally Posted by The Oilman View Post

      Hmm.
      Its complicated.
      But you seem really smart.. I appreciate it.


      What are your thoughts on being more agressive with anchors when internal linking ? I took a lot of this internal linking off after penguin hit.. but part of me thinks G will be more lenient on it... mainly because offsite there is probably less keyword anchor linking than we think... but onsite it makes sense to use it.. thoughts?
      If it makes sense go for it, if it doesn't then make sense out of it. I put around 5/7 anchors in every post with alot of variety. Having a good internal linking vs offsite linking will definately benefit you but I wouldn't link every post to my index page with the keyword but use brand terms for 90% and then use a silo structure for your keyword so:

      post1>post2>post3>post4>post5>post6>post7>Index+ke yword - and then back all the posts up with some decent backlinks.

      mattcutts.com has 10,000 external links to his hompage and 1000 internal links, so around 10%. His deeplinks are around 500,000 but this is quite high, I would say around 3/4 links for every link to your index page is an ideal ratio. I haven't really done any research into the quantity of high pr links vs low pr, but you need to watch out for this...

      If you can, everytime you drop a link to your hompage, drop 2/3 to you internal pages at the same time. If you link to a post more than once, change the anchors up a little. If you build alot of links then just write a schedule perhaps brand + 2 internal links(1), keyword + 2 internal links(2), generic + 2 internal links(3) etc...

      I've seen some high ranking sites with no high pagerank links, split 50% brand, 50% keyword
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  • Profile picture of the author Caleb12
    I would use your brand name, URL, generic terms (click here, read more, etc.), your keyword, and LSI keywords. If you do that it will keep everything natural and balanced like you say it is now.

    Well everything is still a balance with internal linking to. You can still over optimize your internal anchor text which is not good either. I would use a balance for internal linking as well. The main thing with internal linking is I would recommend you don't use a plugin that interlinks all your words in posts etc. to other pages and posts like SEO Smart Links. Instead I would use a related posts feature at the bottom of your posts and internal link when natural within your posts. You can also link to your most recent posts and your categories in your sidebar.
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  • Profile picture of the author TopHats
    What do you guys mean by "brand name" ?
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    • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
      Originally Posted by TopHats View Post

      What do you guys mean by "brand name" ?
      If your site is tophats.com then links like that, "tophats.com" "Top Hats" tophats" "www .tophats.com" etc and not "buy hats online".

      Here are wordpress's top 5 keywords:

      1, wordpress.com
      2, wordpress
      3, get a free blog at wordpress.com
      4, www.wordpress.com
      5, get a blog

      You can see it ranks #4 for "blog" and #2 for "free blog" and #3 for "create a blog".
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