How much is too much?

[DHS_SH]

I am aware that Google's Penguin 2.0 update is looking to tackle the increasing numbers of links from poor quality websites & blogs.

The advice since Penguin 1.0 has been to create a natural backlink profile, ensuring that there is a balance between keywords-rich anchor text and brand terms.

I tend to link using Branded anchor text to the homepage of my website and use keyword anchor text sparingly to link to subpages/categories elsewhere on my website.

My question is what exactly is too much in terms of anchor text? If for example I have 5 or 6 keyword-rich links inbound to a sub/category page, do I need to also get some brand anchor text into these sub/category pages too?

[Theo-NL]

You're stating "I tend to link using Branded ...", are these links internal or coming from external websites? If they are internal, there isn't anything to worry about. When you have actively 'build' those links from other websites, I would be more cautious with pages that you're giving keyword-rich links, and indeed mix it up a little.

What you would want most is to have a natural overall profile. Not necessary a perfect profiles for each page (which, ironically, would be unnatural), but a pattern that would look perfectly diverse, skewed and chaotic in all its natural perfection.

[MikeGracia]

The best advice is, as you say, to be 'natural'. Hard to 'emulate' a natural backlink profile? - Then I hate to say it, but try to earn some natural backlinks

Add UGC to product pages (reviews etc), try to make product pages (assuming this is an eCommerce site!) more interesting (soem great stuff on MOZ about this - including a whiteboard Friday from a while back, I think!).

If you ARE 'building' links, I would recommend avoiding exact match anchors. In terms of what anchor text % to use for each type, and what would look natural, I very strongly suspect that this is different in each industry/niche. Google is pretty good at spotting what other websites any given site is 'related' to, and so would also be able to calculate what, on average, looks dodgy and what looks natural. I would be very surprised if this data didn't at least influence it's algorithm's a little.

Who ranks at the top in your industry? What sort of anchor text do they have pointing to similar sub-pages? - Check this for 3 or 4 top-ranking sites in your sector.

Link like a Journo or blogger

Consider using a mix of brand, url, and natural anchors such as in-sentence links (read a few New York Times blogs to see how they handle citation links (or follow the example i just made! hahaha). Whilst on the NYT blog, why not follow the links from the NYT blogs to their destination URL, and then run an OSE check on those URLs? That will likely show you other examples of natural linking

The long term goal should be to earn links, not build them - I accept this can be a tough call though!