Penalised for specific keywords

[James_T]

Hi guys and girls,

I've recently taken over management of a client that appears to be suffering a punishment on Google for specific keywords.

Firstly has anyone encountered an issue such as this before, specific keyword de-ranking, and if so did re inclusion requests yield any joy?

Thank you in advance for any assistance.

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi James,

I did encounter something similar. You have probably overoptimized a specific keyword. If all your incoming links have the same anchor text and it is not your brand name then Google is punishing you for non-natural link building. Are you ranking for other keywords?. You might have been sandboxed and not know it. What is the domain name?

Thanks

Carla

[Point_It]

Sure, Google's Penguin update has keyword level components, and Google has been penalizing sites at a keyword level for many years when they find a site with too many links coming in using exact match anchor text. Depending on the scope of the problem, there are a number of potential solutions. This post might be helpful in terms of potentially fixing the issue: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Jon and James,

Just a thought but if you have over-optimized a specific anchor text instead of disavowing the links you may want to add more links but with different anchor text so that the anchor text looks more diverse. I'll give you an example.

Over-optimizaed anchor text = "abc"

Hypothetical Current situation

• Amount of "abc" links = 25
• Name brand links = 100

Hypothetical Solution

• Amount of "abc" links = 25
• Name brand links = 100
• New links with "def" anchor text = 10
• New links with "ghi" anchor text = 10

Good luck!

[Point_It]

Ahh yes, the delete or dilute dilemma

In my experience, only sites with very few links can get away with dilution. If your site has thousands of links, and a large percentage are exact anchors, you'd have to engage in some very obvious bulk link building to dilute things quickly and sufficiently. In that scenario, best to find a way to remove the links, either by reaching out to webmasters or through a disavow.

[Carla_Dawson]

Excellent point and something I have not considered.

Thanks Jon

[James_T]

Thank you both for your opinions, this has been a great help.

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi James,

I just answered your PM. thanks

Carla

[Doc_Sheldon]

Another option is to ask webmasters to change your anchor text. But you'll have to do that on a link-by-link basis, in order to provide anchor text that is relevant to both the source and target page.
Also, we've seen a lot of luck changing some portion of your profile to generic anchor text like "read more", "more info" or "website", as well as others using the destination page's title as the anchor text. Finally, you can resort to raw URLs in some, as well. What we try to do there is use a raw URL where we can use either the brand name or the destination page's title in the same sentence.