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Thanks for your reply. Not much help but cheers anyway.

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Nancyjan. Thanks for your reply. It's not checking the backlinks that i am concerned about.

I need to know what impact changing the anchor text on existing backlinks has on the sites SEO.

I think you should not change the anchor text of your backlinks unless and until you do not want to optimize that keyword anymore.

How can you change the anchor text on links you have already placed? Unless your links are on sites that you own of course. The only anchors you can change are those that you are going to place in the future, and that shouldn't matter if you are intending to target different key words than you have been placing links for up till now.

Unless I misunderstood your question that is.

What about forum signature backlinks? When you change your sig it changes the signatures on all posts.

Do the links get dropped and need to be re indexed when you change the anchor text or is it as you mention and only the future ones have any effect?

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For me i will build new backlinks using other new anchor text...

Im sure those bots will crawl the internet to find your old anchor text...if they cant find it, your old backlinks might be drop...

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u are taking about placing urls with signature links and after some time change the keywords of these urls.this is not a good idea for ranking as well as link juice both.

Yes, of course you can change them to something more relevant. Google will pick these changes up. I certainly don't think this will have any negative impact on your site or rankings.

In fact... I'm thinking of editing this particular feature in one of my products. As in, the ability to change the anchor text or URL.

Well, I believe... Changing a few anchor text won't have that much big affect which can break your rankings.

Moreover, they are not ideal anchor texts... SO, I would advise you to change them.

I dont know that it would have much negative effect
heck i had a forum sig link which showed 100s of sig links all from the same domain
i went back in removed it so those links disappeared
didnt affect my resort site rankings