Total Exact Match Anchor Text Percentage or a Few High Quality Exact Match Backlinks, which is better?

[tomfifteen]

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone could help me. I am trying to rank a web page for a competitive regional search term.

Upon inspecting all the competitors’ backlinks they appear to using an overly high exact match anchor text to rank on the first page for this keyword.

Somewhere in the region of 15 – 55% exact match anchor text. So the question is what does big G provide a heavier weighting for,

A.)  The total percentage of exact match anchor text for all your backlinks, until it reaches the point of over optimization. A higher percentage up to about 60% will help you rank in the top 3. Meaning I should change a 1,000+ backlinks on multiple domains to the exact match anchor text.

B.)  Or just a few backlinks with the exact match anchor text but from really high quality domains with a ‘Majestic SEO’ Trust and Citation Flow above 40.

Any help would be appreciated, exact match anchor text is meant not to work but it still does.

[PrintPlace.com]

I would go with a higher amount of " exact match" keywords. As long as the content on the page that it leads to is highly relevant. Google is all about serving the best content for the search query. So be sure to make the content that the person is clicking through to extremely relevant to the topic. This now becomes a quality of content and by serving highly relevant content as opposed to working on back links google is going to go where the content is all the time. Also the time that the user spends on the site is taken into consideration.

Hope this helps.

[Chris.Menke]

You know Tom, it sounds like you might have excessive "exact match" links on the mind  : )  and that can be a limitation to you in today's search.  The sites at which you can get exact match anchor text these days may not pass the value they once were able to and Google doesn't use anchor text to establish relevance to a search query the way it once did, either.

Are there sites whose rankings are being held up by exact match links? Sure. Such legacy-style rankings exist because Google tries not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because the way "importance" on the web was demonstrated in the past (via links and anchor text) is different than the way we're able to demonstrate it today (via social/mentions) doesn't mean some of those old linked-to-with-anchor-text resources are any less important than they once were.

Think of what makes you recognize that something is "important" in your everyday environment.  Is it that a number of lower quality references all say exactly the same thing about something? Not really.  Things that are important tend to be the focus of a variety of semantic references and sentiments from a variety of high- and low-quality sources and it's that kind of importance, aka authority, that you're trying to replicate in your off-page efforts. Focus on getting people to discuss your product/service rather than just getting webmasters to link to it.

Granted, all the above is a bunch of longer-term strategic gibberish that you can toss out the window if your business tactics and search marketing efforts are focused on the short term.  If that's the case, I'd go with "B", but good luck with that.

[tomfifteen]

Hello Malcom,

Thank you for replying to my question. In theory; I agree with this, producing high quality pages for the end user. However in reality for competitive niches, it does not matter how good your landing page is, it will not rank in a competitive niche. As all the competitors have such inflated exact match anchor text backlinks.

We will definitely look at improving our landing pages as a long term strategy.

Kind regards

Rob

[tomfifteen]

Hello Chris,

Thank you for replying to my question. It is a difficult one, I think as a company we will have to go with a safer long term strategy and see how it pans out. Maybe a PR stunt, instead of exact match backlinks.

Kind regards

Rob