Your Experience with Exact Match Anchor Text Penalties

[SparkplugDigital]

Hi Moz community!

I was wondering if anyone has ever seen a site penalized or dampened because of too many exact match anchor links or know of any examples.

I don't want to be overly concerned about it if it is a low risk.

Thanks!

[NakulGoyal]

I don't have examples that I could share in a QA Forum, but think from Google's Webspam team perspective. Artificial SERP manipluation in indeed a big problem for them. Think about the Whitehouse Google Bomb (Bush's Miserable Failure Search). It's just too easy to detect and not worth the risk. It all depends site to site, depending upon a site's link profile history and age.

[Francisco_Meza]

JC Pennys got in trouble for this. Matt Cutts manually deranked them:

http://searchengineland.com/new-york-times-exposes-j-c-penney-link-scheme-that-causes-plummeting-rankings-in-google-64529

Just don't overdo your act. Throw in variations of the keyword. Try and make it look more natural.

Also, use your Google Analytics to find keywords that may actually be converting at a higher rate.