A backlinks question

[GrumpyCarl]

Hi all

Could do with a second opinion on this one if anyone has a moment please.

Recent Google updates have targeted overally optimised backlink profiles as they are clearly for seo purposes and not natural. The question I have is how does this relate to an ecommerce website?

If I sell 'blue 1980 aged cheese' (I know nothing about cheese so perhaps not the best example!!) and I have a url on my shop domain.com/store/blue-1980-aged-cheese with the product name as the page title along with the domain name.  If I were to get backlinks pointing to this page using the anchor of 'blue 1980 aged cheese' (and other variations of that, blue cheese, aged blue cheese etc) would this be considered to be too optimised?

Given the page is about this item then surely it could be considered natural that people link using the product name, as well as using the site name and the domain url

Any thoughts please

Thanks, Carl

[Talooma]

The anchor text from your link profile, will never penalize you. It might not be as great as a keyword based anchor text but it doesn't have a negative impact. On the other side, if you have 80% of your link's anchor text saying "blue 1980 aged cheese", Google will see that something's not right and you will not get the value that you would from a natural link profile.

If the links are genuine and are inbound from genuine websites and not link farms or spam sites, you should be fine. Penguin is about penalizing black hat tactics, for example, buying links from link farms.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Carl

There was a good study done on this by Distilled and published here at SEOMoz a while back.

As I remember, they looked at anchor text distribution for different types of pages and it was determined that product pages would have around 45% keyword anchors (varied of course). They then broke that 45% down so that 25% of it was an exact match anchor and then the rest was several varieties of that including branding etc.

The whole article is worth a read but the general advice was that you work to a 7:3 ratio and for every 3 (varied) keyword links you build you would add seven branded or safe links (URL etc).

Another point worth noting here is that product pages don't tend to get mega amounts of external links. I just checked a few well established products on amazon and they tended to have a low amount of links. Somewhere between 10 and 25. In fact, the main xbox 360 model only had 22 links so don't go overboard.

There is a lot more to what is considered natural with links than just anchor text though so be careful if you are asking this to help engineer the natural or create a supernatural set of product links.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

References

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/

[GrumpyCarl]

Marcus/Rod

Thanks for taking the time to reply. You make some very interesting points which I will take on board. I will take a look over the studies mentioned. You're right when saying the product pages on big retailers such as Amazon tend to have little to no backlinks. My website has about 85,000 products so one of the alternative strategies being considered is to seo just the root domain or the categories instead. It will take longer to see results this way but if I can get the overall domain authority much higher by working with just a few pages then the knock on effect should help the rest of the site.

Many thanks

[GrumpyCarl]

Marcus/Rod

Thanks for taking the time to reply. You make some very interesting points which I will take on board. I will take a look over the studies mentioned. You're right when saying the product pages on big retailers such as Amazon tend to have little to no backlinks. My website has about 85,000 products so one of the alternative strategies being considered is to seo just the root domain or the categories instead. It will take longer to see results this way but if I can get the overall domain authority much higher by working with just a few pages then the knock on effect should help the rest of the site.

Many thanks

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey,  a couple of links to the top 100 products would likely make a big difference, just try to keep it natural.

You may do better with a highly scalable content + outreach campaign to bring in hundreds of links as manual link building for this many pages is just not practical.

Or, alternatively, some kind of competition or some such to try and stimulate natural linking to the product pages - obviously, idea needs fleshing out and not knowing your industry it's a total shot in the dark but... there is always a way.

Best of luck! 
Marcus