Anchor Text and over optimization

[Bizio]

Hello everyone,

I would like to have your expert (hopefully) opinion on one thing: I am working on a specifi page of a pretty big site, and I noticed one thing in particular. This page is linked to from a lots of internal pages (which is ok) but the anchor text used is in most cases the exact keyword they would like to rank for. I know this is not generally a good thing, but I guess they have so many links with that particular anchor because of the breadcrumbs, and this actually makes sense. Now, if this is the case, how could we work this out (if this is an issue)? Or probably this is not an issue since those links don’t carry a lot of SEO weight…don’t know.

Thanks for your opinion on this

[ofw12387]

Well, ideal case is variety of anchors,  but you are speaking about internal links so i dont think it´s a big problem.

Problematic would be if those links with same achors would be external links

[taryn_s]

Howdy,

This all really depends on what the anchor text being used is and how natural it sounds. For example, if it's a service such as car insurance that your site offers, using 'car insurance' as the anchor text would make complete sense as this is how the service is referred to. However, if it's something more long tail than this - car insurance California, for example, it would look unnatural and would not be recommended.

Are you able to share the URL for the page you're working on so we can take a closer look? Feel free to send me a PM if you'd prefer.

Another thing you could do is to look at your competitors in the SERPs for your targeted term(s) and see what they're doing. Open Site Explorer's Anchor Text tool is a great way to look at internal links pointing to a particular page so you can get a really good idea of what others are doing.

[Bizio]

HI guys, thank you very much for your kind help. Yes the anchor is perfectly natural, and it makes sense that a link from the footer is not seen as an over optimization, otherwise all big sites should have this issue However, I already did an analysis of the competitors considering A LOT of things and our site, at least on paper, should rank higher (and I took into consideration not just what was on the moz report but html errors, page speed, word count and so on…pretty through). There are things that can be done to improve the page optimization, but what is interesting, is that all the pages that are outranking us have some sort of keyword variation in the URL. I thought the keyword in the URL was not a big deal, but if that’s the case, well, it kind of gets confusing with everyone saying that keywords in the URL are not important. Do you have any experience on this? Not sure if I can share the URL but in case I can, I will Thank you so very much!

[taryn_s]

Hi Parodi,

Including your targeted keywords in your URL is definitely recommended. As a general rule, people should be able to read the URL and understand what the page is about before clicking. Pete Meyers wrote a great post on this a few years back but all of the information in it is still very much valid today.

One really important thing to note - if you do change your URLs to include your targeted keywords (and there's no real reason you shouldn't), remember to redirect the old versions properly using 301 redirects.

One final thing you might want to try if you haven't already is Moz's On-Page Grader Tool which will look at important on-page ranking factors for your targeted search term and give you a list of things you can do to improve the relevancy of the page.

[Bizio]

Hi Brendan!

The post you linked is really interesting! Thanks! There are so much info out there that it’s quite easy to miss the good stuff

Yep, and for the on-page grader I already checked that one: A

Thank you very much for your kind help