Advantages of Replacing Anchor Text with an Image?

[CFSSEO]

Greetings,

I was reading the a recent case study pertaining to Penguin 2.1.  (My website was hit hard)

It stated:  "While classifying the website’s anchor texts (sorted by count), the first thing that strikes you is that the vast majority of the anchors are straight money keywords, which could be a possible reason for the penalty." My website suffers from a similar situation.

Is there any advantage to replacing the links to my website on my affiliate sites with images instead of using Anchor Text?  My manager is concerned with losing so many backlinks.

Thanks!

[Asjad]

Hello,

I Will recommend you to change your anchor text links to the image links. After Penguin you cannot build anchor text backlinks so do it with images..

Perfect example is Wooecommerce website they have alot of image backlinks and they are sitting on top spots.

Thanks

[Nishadha]

I think if you're hit by the Penguin update then Google has already deemed you have bad/unnatural links pointing to your site to game rankings. The first step is to identify those links. Then you can start thinking about getting them removed or using the disavow tool to disavow them.

I don't think replacing the anchor text with image will help at all. You might be even harming yourself by removing legit links.

[Carson-Ward]

I wouldn't count on affiliate links passing value to your site in the long term.

http://www.webpronews.com/heres-what-googles-matt-cutts-says-about-affiliate-links-and-nofollow-2012-06

Note that most of the presentation is addressed to affiliates rather than to the program owners. Google tries to identify affiliate links and discount them, so you might not be gaining any value from these links anyway. If the links come from low-authority or low-quality sites AND have anchor text, it's surely not worth the risk. From Google's perspective, you shouldn't try to gain link equity from a link when financial compensation is involved. Ads, affiliate links, and other paid-for links should technically all be nofollow.

Images and branded links for affiliates may help avoid penalties (even though Google will probably devalue the links eventually), but where you're already penalized and in need of a manual reconsideration, I'd just get as close to what Google wants as possible.