I think my inbound link anchor text looks un-natural to google - How to fix?

[isntworkdull]

Hi all,

For a bit of back ground see this question i posted recently: http://www.seomoz.org/q/lost-over-65-of-organic-visits-since-sept-please-help

From the responses there and looking into  my backlinks and my competitors i can see an issue with the anchor text on my inbound links... nearly all keywords and very very few brand names etc...

From what i can gather (using open site explorer) the page in question has:

1. 1100 inbound links from 900 domains
2. These use 90 different anchor texts
3. 106 of these links use my brand / website name in the anchor text
4. These 106 links are spread over 18 domains (73 from 1 directory)
5. About 5-10% of the links are from directories, the rest are from what i would describe as "proper websites"

From my very limited knowledge of this, the issue is my brand / website should have a far higher ratio of links using it as the anchor text then any keyword... which as you can see from the above is not the case... If it wasnt for that 1 directory there would only be 33 links with my brand from over 1000...

I need to start fixing this, but was wondering how to start... Below are a list of options i could try, i have no idea if these would help or hinder, any advice you could give on the potential affects of below options would be very helpful:

Options (the below are hypothetical, i have no idea if i will be able to get it done - Just thinking out loud here):

Get as many as possible of the "directory" links removed

Remove keywords from 50-60% of links and replace with branding

Or

Try to add branding to 50-60% of the anchor texts something like [Brand] + [keyword]

Forget about whats been done previously / changing it will not help in anyway / and focus on branding in anchor text for any future link building?

Thanks

James

[anthonydnelson]

Hi James,

I think you are on the right path with these three statements:

1. Get as many as possible of the "directory" links removed
2. Remove keywords from 50-60% of links and replace with branding
3. Forget about whats been done previously / changing it will not help in anyway / and focus on branding in anchor text for any future link building?

I wouldn't consider #3 to be exclusive from 1 and 2. If it was my site, I'd work on all of these.

I don't know your website URL, but if you feel like it is very Keyword Heavy, I would also consider "de-optimizing" it a bit. Bascially- just make sure you've written page titles and copy for humans.