Do we know if inbalanced anchor text distribution also applies to internal links?

[UnderRugSwept]

I have the pages of my site linked together very well with editorial links in my copy and blog posts. But now I'm starting to wonder post-penguin if it's a problem if all my internal links to a certain page have the same anchor text? Or is my internal link juice not powerful enough to set off a red flag? I don't think I've seen this addressed anywhere or if we even know the answer to this or can only speculate.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I hope this helps http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link

[UnderRugSwept]

Thanks. That's good basic information about anchor text in general, but says nothing about how it relates to Penguin.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Marisa,

from everything I've read about Penguin and it is quite a bit I would practice the same best practices for internal links as I did for external links. Never make a link over 115 characters is the rule from Google I would just make sure you avoid them thinking your keyword stuffing even though you most likely are just building your site correctly. On page  anchor text aside from the length are not yet part of Penguin. Here's a list of some of the on page things they look for.

• Pages Where The Title is Missing or Empty* Duplicate Page Content Analysis* Duplicate Page Title Analysis* Pages That have Long URLs (> 115 characters)* Overly-Dynamic URL Analysis* Meta Refresh Analysis* Pages Where the Title Element is Too Short* Pages Where the Title Element is Too Long (> 70 Characters)* Pages Containing Too Many On-Page Links* Missing Meta Description Tag Analysis* Robots.txt Analysis* Meta-robots Nofollow Analysis* Meta-robots Analysis* Canonical Tags Analysis* Indexed URLs Analysis* Total URLs Receiving Traffic* Total Keywords Sending Traffic

I will look in detail for you on this and get a much better answer I apologize things are hectic right now.

Sincerely,

Thomas von Zickell

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Marisa,

This is a good question and one I could only really speculate on but here is my thinking:

We know that Google likes links to be natural (or at least look natural) hence the focus on over-optimization in the recent update. So it would be natural to assume that Google will be looking for the same thing with internal links. This then raises the question what would look natural for internal links? Of course, as the website owner has control over the internal links, it would be safe to assume that most (if not all) internal links are going to have the same anchor text. This is just natural. However, external links are completely different and it would certainly look unnatural if all the anchors were the same commercial term.

Anyway, that's my thoughts.

Adam.

[dohertyjf]

This is a great question, and from some posts I've seen it seems that plugins like SEO Smart Links have caused issues with Penguin: http://www.itechcode.com/2012/05/19/vital-seo-tips-after-penguin-algorithm-update/

So I would say yes. Be careful using things like SEO Smart Links or KB Linker, as they can cause you to unnaturally link certain words all the time, in a way that is not good for user experience either.

It's harder when you are talking navigation, etc, but I posit (and I have no proof of this) that menus and such are not as at-risk to be hit with Penguin as overdone in context links.

As we always say, what would users expect to see? Give them that.

Hope this helps

[UnderRugSwept]

That's a good theory. It's not like I've loaded internal links in every other sentence of every blog post. I only did it where it would help the customer by giving them more information. Between all my blog posts, I think each post ranges from 0-4 links, 4 being a rare occasion, one or two being the most common. I guess I'm not too worried, since post-penguin we are now #1.