Is This Going to Screw Me Up SEO Wise?

theres no such thing as a bad backlink. its no different than creating a link on directory site or on ezinearticles.

if you think it will affect your rankings then make the link no follow

I wouldnt worry to much about that. You will still have high keyword count for your blog purpose, and im assuming your page description contains keywords relating to your purpose also, so I would serve good content over the worry for keyword density as you will always be rewarded for that. Think of news sites, topical sites that change content hourly, daily it wont effect your rankings as long as your content is regularly updated

Tiff: Yes it can cause problems.

I'm actually writing about this in a book I'm hoping to finish and release later today. Essentially, what and who you link to can affect the ranking and SEO of the page you're linking from. This is a forgotten part of SEO that no one seems to believe anymore (thanks to the whole 'pagerank bleed' bs) and it's actually kind of funny sometimes.

A link with anchor text on your site has a similar effect to making text bold on your site. The SEs apply more weight to the words/phrases that are linked.

This is particularly problematic if you're running context based ads like AdSense, and you'll notice it pretty quickly because the ads will change to start matching the linked anchor text and phrases. The search engine listings can get confused too, and start ranking you for those and dropping your ranking for the older topics.

If you have enough balance in the form of on page text AND on topic anchored links you can usually keep everything the way it should be. If there's more of the new context links than there are on topic links though, the SEs will assume you've changed the topic focus on your site.

You can also try rewording the links you're making. If it's an IM blog and you're linking to IM case studies, instead of linking to something like "get your ex back", try doing "Internet Marketing Case Study: get your ex back". Linking to the whole thing should do the trick but you can also bold the IM case study part of your link, or just make those words linked alone with "get your ex back" unlinked.

Hope that all makes sense and hope it helps,
Kathy

Sorry I must have explained badly somewhere

I wasn't saying the text in AS will influence SE results, I was saying that you can see the effects of your anchor text links on the page through AS ads.

Example: If you have a page on IM and it's showing appropriate IM related ads in the AS blocks, then you add several anchor text links about furry cats to the text on the page, you'll see the AS ads start displaying ads related in some way to furry cats.

You get a response to anchor text similar to the way you get a response to bold text. Yes with ads and with search engine rankings. No time to dig out sharable examples right now but I'll try to see if I have anything soon.

BTW: Adsense is a *wonderful* mirror to the search engines. It shows what it thinks your page is about, and that's reflected in what your page is ranked for too.

Thanks so much Kathy! I don't use AdSense on my IM blog so I can't check that but I do love the idea of making my links say, "IM case study: how to get your ex back" or whatever. That's a great idea! I'll do that from now on

I was worried because right now I'm only do long tail but go to Google and search "i miss my ex now she's gone" without quotes and see - I'm #3 and 4. LOL. Made me start getting nervous.

Hehe, yep I see it Glad I could help

If I were creating that link I would go a step further and do:

"Internet Marketing Case Study": get your ex back

I would not put the "get your ex back" in the link at all, but your readers would not have a problem seeing that that is what the link is for. Therefore you would just have "IM case study" for the SE's to chew on.