Anchor text analysis

[madegood]

Hello!

I'm doing a systematic review of my site after getting a bit of a  heavy punishment from google last month. I think things are going in the right direction, but wanted some advice on anchor text. Here is a link to the top 200 terms as exported from WMT;

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkGVm349qCtIdHYzR01EVDhBOHFIekJZS0FVbG9RN1E#gid=0

Can someone give me some advice on whether anything looks suspicious or not? or is it not that simple? My site is madegood.org.

Thanks so much in advance. I've had some fantastic help on here already, but really any advice is appreciated.

Cheers

[Chris.Menke]

I think those look about as natural as they come.

[madegood]

Thanks Chris.

Is that a general concensus?

[BlastAM]

I don't see anything in the anchor text that stands out as immediately problematic. Are these internal or external links?

It's hard to give more advice without more information, but one thing I see on your site is that you have some links in the code that aren't on the page. You should figure out how much of that is happening and why. Depending on the answer you find, it may be something to address.

Plus the link to content ratio is off a bit. You may want to add more content and group your inner links to lower the count.

[madegood]

Hi there BlastAM,

These are the Anchor Links from from webmaster tools, which I'm fairly sure are external(?).

i'm not sure i quite follow what you mean when you say I have 'some links in the code that aren't on the page'.

could you also explain what you mean by that last comment too. Sorry if I'm asking a stupid question!

i'm rebuilding the site from scratch at the mo', so all your technical suggestions are very useful.

Thanks so much!

[Chris.Menke]

Something that does stand out in that list is the relatively small amount of brand terms.  One would think that a site like this would more links to the home page with branded terms than it looks like you've got. In that respect, I might say your links don't look as natural as they should.

[BlastAM]

If you look at the code for the page /bikes/how-to/check-a-rear-hub/, you'll see that there are two links that appear to be part of a pagination element

Chain Wear ». But no part of that actually shows on the page itself (user-facing).

As far as the link-to-content ratio,  site is a little light on text, but heavy on links. Just completing the site by putting text in each of the "contents", "tools" and "parts" sections will help with that. I'm sure that's your plan, but since it's not done currently and you're having issues, it's worth pointing out.

Google doesn't like things like hidden text/links or too little text with too many links so these issues could be throwing up a red flag in Google's eyes.

[KaneJamison]

That looks like pretty good anchor text overall. I'm looking at your links in Open Site Explorer and they also look fine to me. Tons of branded anchor text is showing, which is good, and plenty of random anchor text as well. I really doubt that this has anything to do with a link-based penalty. I'd sooner expect some sort of on-site issues or change in competition.

Regarding this part: "after getting a bit of a  heavy punishment from google last month" - I would open up Google Analytics and open up the date selector and select the day that traffic dropped off until now (eg March 18th through today). Then check the box that says "Compare to previous period".

Now, surf over to "Traffic Sources" in the left sidebar of Google Analytics and start looking for things that have dropped off significantly. Drop in landing pages? Organic Traffic? This will be a good indicator of why your traffic has dropped if you don't already know for sure.

[madegood]

Thanks, that's made it crystal clear!

Not sure why the hidden navigation is there but I'm sure I can get to the bottom of it.

Did you use a tool to flag these hidden elements up, or did you just look at the page source?

Thanks again, I'm very grateful you took the time to look at this

[madegood]

The thing that looks odd to me is that 'disclaimer' is number 4- what's going on there!? Surely that's an internal link that's somehow being read as an external one?

[madegood]

Thanks Kane,

I did as you said and the one strange thing that sticks out is that engagement seems to be up by a significant amount- both page views and time spent on site. Everything else is down though, every referral source. Perhaps it could have been an engagement issue, as in, people were not spending long enough on my site?

[KaneJamison]

Well, it could just be that lots of organic search traffic was finding you through blog posts and resource content and then leaving the site right away. That's normal and OK - it can mean that they found what they wanted and then left. I wouldn't worry about that as a ranking factor - I doubt that it's going to cause any significant change in rankings in your niche.

[madegood]

Thanks for all your advice!