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Why would you use learn more,read more , or click here etc as anchor text?

by nest28
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I see a lot of people saying they use click here, read more, learn more etc just to diversify their anchor text, and I don't understand why.

Let's say you have a site about amc's the walking dead, which is a t.v. show about zombies btw, and you wanted to rank for "the walking dead" I personally wouldn't use click here but rather something like this:

zombies
tv show
horror
the undead
animated corpse
drama television series
walkers
comic book series
zombie apocalypse
Rick Grimes
Shane
walking dead season 1
walking dead season 3 teaser

I think you get the point , also why not use certain keywords from you articles and build a list of keywords, if you have a 20 page site, and you took 3 keywords from each article that be 60 different words you could use as anchor text.


Maybe I'm missing something but I did check a couple high pr sites and didn't find any click here or read more.
#anchor #click #learn #read #text
  • Profile picture of the author Carl Brown
    Here's one guy's experience (click here ) and what he found searching his backlinks. It seems to be almost exclusively about over optimized anchor text. The rule seems to be, If you're going to backlink, you have to think like the visitor and not the owner of the website. WWYVD (What Would Your Visitor Do)?

    The answer seems to be to add it to the mix. Adobe takes the top 6 positions for "click here". clickhere.com is at #7
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  • Profile picture of the author Mantasmo
    No reason. Some people simply associate natural anchor text with stuff like click here and read more. There's nothing more to it really - no secret recipe or whatever.

    It makes sense to have a few anchors like that. It's more about diversity than any specific anchor text keywords tbh.

    edit: I agree with your example.
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi nest28,

      I think the whole "diversify your anchor text" notion is a myth, based purely on Cargo Cult Science.

      I have found no evidence to support this notion in all the data I have analyzed, nor have I heard of any credible evidence made available to the public. Repeating false information, over and over again, may cause peope to start to believe in it, however that does not make it true, it just makes it into misinformation.

      I am open to taking a fresh look at this notion, if anyone has any credible evidence to share, if so, please do.
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      • Profile picture of the author nest28
        Originally Posted by Carl Brown View Post

        Here's one guy's experience (click here ) and what he found searching his backlinks. It seems to be almost exclusively about over optimized anchor text. The rule seems to be, If you're going to backlink, you have to think like the visitor and not the owner of the website. WWYVD (What Would Your Visitor Do)?

        The answer seems to be to add it to the mix. Adobe takes the top 6 positions for "click here". clickhere.com is at #7
        lol click here...but thanks for the link to the article, I'm just saying if you want to mix up your anchor text why not use keywords that at least have something to do with your site, instead of click here.

        Originally Posted by bnetwork View Post

        No reason. Some people simply associate natural anchor text with stuff like click here and read more. There's nothing more to it really - no secret recipe or whatever.

        It makes sense to have a few anchors like that. It's more about diversity than any specific anchor text keywords tbh.

        edit: I agree with your example.
        Cool, thought I was missing something for minute there.
        Originally Posted by dburk View Post

        Hi nest28,

        I think the whole "diversify your anchor text" notion is a myth, based purely on Cargo Cult Science.

        I have found no evidence to support this notion in all the data I have analyzed, nor have I heard of any credible evidence made available to the public. Repeating false information, over and over again, may cause peope to start to believe in it, however that does not make it true, it just makes it into misinformation.

        I am open to taking a fresh look at this notion, if anyone has any credible evidence to share, if so, please do.
        There has been a lot of people out there that say they recovered by diversifying the anchor text to their sites, and that not doing so in the first place is what caused a over optimization penalty. Most of my old sites used the same anchor text and now there all on page 100, so maybe there is some truth to this so called myth.
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        • Profile picture of the author dburk
          Originally Posted by nest28 View Post

          There has been a lot of people out there that say they recovered by diversifying the anchor text to their sites, and that not doing so in the first place is what caused a over optimization penalty. Most of my old sites used the same anchor text and now there all on page 100, so maybe there is some truth to this so called myth.
          Hi nest28

          That sounds like the typical spurious relationship that leads people down the Cargo Cult Science path.

          The problem with looking at that kind of anecdotal data, is that there is no real attempt to ascertain the cause. People are just grasping at the first correlation they spot, but correlation does not imply causation. It appears to be yet another third-cause fallacy that is so commonly promulgated on this forum.

          To buy into that flawed conclusion you have to ignore all the evidence that disproves the theory. To use an analogy, it's a little like stating that painting your car red will make it go faster, and to offer proof, you point to statistics that show red as the most popular color for first place cars. It's just not sound thinking when you do nothing to test the actual cause.

          As I said before, if anyone has credible evidence that supports this theory, I'd love to see it, but spurious relationships are not credible evidence, and easily disproved by contrary evidence.
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      • Profile picture of the author cooler1
        Originally Posted by dburk View Post

        Hi nest28,

        I think the whole "diversify your anchor text" notion is a myth, based purely on Cargo Cult Science.

        I have found no evidence to support this notion in all the data I have analyzed, nor have I heard of any credible evidence made available to the public. Repeating false information, over and over again, may cause peope to start to believe in it, however that does not make it true, it just makes it into misinformation.

        I am open to taking a fresh look at this notion, if anyone has any credible evidence to share, if so, please do.
        So do you reckon that Penguin is primarily based on the quality of backlinks to a site? What about in the case of wpmu.org where they removed thousands of site-wide links using the same anchor text. Did they recover because those links were on poor quality sites?

        I read a blog post earlier which said that if you have a lot of backlinks which show a page authority below 40 in opensiteexplorer.org then that is bad regarding penguin.
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        • Profile picture of the author Carl Brown
          I have several sited decimated by penguin. I got the usual "unnatural links" notice. What else is it?

          I considered any other link except the keyword I was working toward to be a waste of a useful link. I managed several sites for a friend. I put my anchor text for several sites on every page of his websites. No other anchor text was used. When I got the unnatural links notice, I was sent beyond position 1000. I then went to all sites under my control and removed all those links. After doing that, ALL of my sites improved. That was the ONLY thing I did for those penalized sites. After removing those links, one once profitable site came back to #150. I won't earn money from a site at #150, but the experience tells me something.

          Others I've talked to have similar experiences. We can never know exactly what Google's doing, but if you take a step forward and you get a certain response, you should be able to learn something from that--especially if you take a step back and it fixes the problem.
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  • Profile picture of the author nik0
    Banned
    I completely agree with dburk on this one cause I still see plenty of sites ranking that didn't diversify their anchor txt, doesn't take away that it gives me a more safe feeling to diversify it cause it would be real easy for Google to detect and not unlikely they implent it in the very near future, maybe they already did, I am not 100% sure of course.

    What I think this update is much more about is the ratio of low quality vs high quality links, and I primarly mean PR n/a vs PR1+ links. Most people that are hit have been spamming mainly links that never hit a page with PR, and the pages where their links did pass a page with PR first are all deindexed (think of ALN, HPRS, UAW, BMR etc).

    So what's left for them? Blogcomments, okay bad example cause these are high PR but also high on Google's spam list so I don't think these will be counted, so what else? Article directories, Web2.0's, Forum profiles, Wiki links. All ending up on PR n/a pages.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sillysoft
    Maybe because those are call to actions. Hey want to see my site? Click here!
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  • Profile picture of the author lovboa
    Banned
    It all depends on the authority and quality of a certain percentage of your links + your on page content.

    My authority site has about 10 links from really hard to get sources like college sites in the country and sites that were in the niche for 10 years. I got these by emailing them and saying I want to grow my site as a helpful resource for students, and if they would take a look and agree that it would be helpful to students, to link to my site.

    The majority of my links are spam links ordered from fiverr. I don't do it anymore, but when I first discovered fiverr, I ordered about 30 gigs. All with the same anchor text. However, I was not hit by panda or penguin. I have never once did any anchor text variation for this site.
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