What Would You Consider a Good Backlink Profile?

[sbrault74]

I know there's no such thing as a perfect profile but when you're building links, do you try to maintain certain ratios such as:

• dofollow vs. nofollow
• exact match anchors vs. raw URL anchors vs. random anchors (click here, visit site, etc.)

Thanks!

[JMacSupply]

As a link builder - I would not pay attention to dofollow vs. nofollow ratios.  Just go and try to get the best links you can, whether followed or no-followed.

As far as the anchors - I would personally allow the anchors to be as natural as possible, so when you ask for a link to a page from a webmaster, don't even include what you would like the anchor to be - just let them pick naturally.

[Carson-Ward]

On the dofollow vs. nofollow thing, I've written about it before:

http://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/Since-Quora-renders-all-outbound-links-with-nofollow-attribute-what-is-the-SEO-value-of-such-Quora-links-then

Don't worry too much about that. I don't think it's suspicious to have 0 nofollow links, and I don't think Google could draw any valid conclusions based on that alone.

Anchor text is a little trickier. Penguin initially set a pretty low bar - even at 50% high-value anchor text you were pretty much safe. They've since honed in, and will continue to do so. More importantly, they're looking at non-achor-text ways to target manipulative links. Generally speaking, if you can control the anchor text, it has a high potential to be a manipulative link. This is what happens when you "build" or "earn" links rather than trying to build an audience.

Look one step down the funnel, instead: rather than looking about the perfect links individually, look at how you're going to get the perfect links. For example, rather than trying to build anchor text, build a good piece of content that will also get you relevant anchor text. Want to rank for insurance terms? Build a bunch of useful content pieces around insurance.