Making anchor text look more natural

[Paul78]

Hi there,

I have recently been approached by a company looking to do some SEO work for them, having had a look at their link profile, they had being using a lot of exact match anchor and have seen a drop in the rankings, no surprise there.

I was thinking of asking the website where they have placed these links and changing them, so there is a mixture of exact, phrase, brand etc, what do you think? would this be best practice? or just leave these as they are and start building fresh links?

Kind Regards

[William.Lau]

Are these sites spam sites? If they are legitimate links, there is rarely a chance it will effect rankings. If you however, get these and requested these links, it would negatively effect you at the end and you might want to just remove those bad sites and keep the good ones.

If sites are all good and just happens to have same match throughout, I would just contact the site to have them change it up a bit, whether it is a 4-5 word anchor text or simply the URL(very normal).

[Paul78]

Hi William,

They are actually placed on good websites, however they have just been excessive in using exact match anchor text which has done them no favours.

Let's say I go and change 40% of these to brand, phase etc would it not be suspicious to search engines that nothing on the page itself has changed apart from the anchor text?

Kind Regards

[Audiohype]

I would say keep them if they are good links, but you would probably want to look at changing percentages of anchor text and adding in some more "natural" terms such as brand names and generic terms.

A good guideline to a natural backlink profile can be found here:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/post-penguin-seo-link-building-the-naked-url-truth/

Been referencing this one a lot recently as I find it's a great way of explaining types of anchor text.

[kyleNeedham]

Hi Gary,

I am currently working on a link profile which is very heavy in exact match anchors, by going deeper into this problem  i noticed that there was such are large amount present because of  footer, blogroll or site-wide links with the exact match anchor.

I suggest you use Open Site Explorer advanced report tool and filter on the exact match text which you would like to focus on, once you have the CSV export you can go through the list of domains linking in on that anchor, then you could use SpyOnWeb to check how many sites share the shame IP address, should you find that site shares the same ip address as a lot of other sites it's most likely part of a link farm and it would be best to request the link be completely removed. (You could also examine it's link profile and content to check its quality).

All good domains you find linking in you could request them to change the anchor slightly to something branded or even just the URL, although i would probably just leave the quality links alone and create good content to make people link in which would be 100% natural and would balance your link profile.

Kyle

[Paul78]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the link, very good read.

I also read this:

Clearly, after Panda 3.3, Google implemented some sort of threshold for what they feel is an appropriate ratio of anchor text that any website should have. Websites with a higher ratio than this threshold saw the value of all of those links completely discounted — it was as if they didn’t exist anymore

On http://www.audiencebloom.com/2012/04/how-to-recover-your-rankings-after-panda-3-3-3-4-3-5-or-penguin-delete-or-dilute/

Does this mean going back to these websites where the exact match anchor text is a changing it to lets say phrase or brand will not make any difference?