Link Profile, is the keyword ratio too high?

[ianwr]

Hi,

Our website (www.NutritionMission.co.uk) has dropped from 6 to 30 in the ranking for our main keyword (Nutritional Therapy).

Pulling a spreadsheet off of all the inbound links looks like 41% of anchor text is related to Nutritional Therapy.

Is this ratio too high for the new google update? There are also a lot of directory submissions from the SEO people we were paying before.

Anyone point me on the right track to get some idea to how to work things out? ie. add more links to ratio of anchor text is lowered etc.

Kind Regards,

Ian.

[AJPro]

Hello Debi-Ann!

In my opinion I think your drop in the serp is because of links coming from link directories and spam blogs. These links don't count much (if any) after Google's Penguin update.

Yes it's possible Google uses the anchor text to spot unnatural link building.

For you getting some really good links from some authoritative sites might be really helpful.

I'm not a Google employee, just my guess.

[JordanGodbey]

Hey Ian,

Hard to say for sure without doing some more detailed analysis, but I would say it's a warning flag for sure.. A lot of Google's changes recently revolve around "over-optimization" and spam/crap links, blog networks, etc.

41% of your backlinks are exact match anchor text for "nutritional therapy", that doesn't look natural at all.

We are doing a back link study right now and some sites who are ranking very well for big keywords have little to NO exactly keyword match anchor text links to their site. They have really good on-page describing the KW they are targeting and have very high quality/authoritative links spread through their sites, usually with their brand name or URL, and sometimes with a keyword.

You should check out a very good article on SEO Gadget about this

Link Building: Anchor Text Optimisation Best Practices in 2012 - https://seogadget.co.uk/link-building-anchor-text-optimisation-best-practices/

Hope that helps,

Jordan

[ianwr]

Thanks Chaps, really good info as usual.

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Ian,

I would have to agree that it does look like your backlink profile may have contributed to your recent drop in rankings.

The recent Google update, as rightly stated by Jordan, has centered around over-optimization. This has meant that many sites which have focussed on creating links with mainly commercial anchors such as 'nutritional therapy' or 'nutritional therapist' have been hit hard by the latest algorithm update.

Rob Kerry produced a really interesting Whiteboard Friday recently, where he talks about the over-optimization of anchor text.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-penguin-update-whiteboard-friday

Having looked at your backlink profile I would suggest that you focus on building more brand specific anchor links (http://www.nutritionmission.co.uk or Nutrition Mission) as these look more natural than the large number of commercial anchors you currently have.

Adam.