Link Quality and Anchor Text

[daugherty]

ok I was wondering how to determine the quality of a link and if there is a way to tell that the site linking to you could be passing on penalized link juice to your site. Also i would like to know some of yalls opinion on using anchor text links in articles and blogs. Now that google seems to have taken some of its "importance" away

[NakulGoyal]

Think of link building as conventional brand building / PR and you will have all your answers. If you/your website gets mentioned by New York Times in an article/blog/news vs a small blogger, which one is more important. Simply put, if the website that is linking to you has links to itself, it's an important link. Your best bet is to look at the Domain Authority Score to get a top level view. As for anchor text, I would avoid overdoing anything. Use your brand name to build up the authority and you can outrank a lot more people in the long run, however in the short run, anchor text might work out better. Depends what your goals are. I hope this helps.

[daugherty]

Thanks for the quick response Nakul...Right now my main concern is getting back to the top 5 for the keywords we were raking for before we were hit by penguin. I am trying to determine if we are being penalized because of our backlinks and anchor text or onpage issues.

[NakulGoyal]

You are definitely on the right track. I would continue to work on quality/quantity of the content/freshness depending upon the niche. At the same time, do an audit of your link profile and compare it to a couple of the competing URLs who are outranking you and see what you notice as the brand links vs anchor text links and so on. Also, make sure you are not doing too many links of any one kind.