What should my optimal anchor text look like, given cannibalization risk?

[aran088]

We have a content page with the explicit goal of ranking highly for "raised garden beds". We drive traffic from this page to our various types of raised garden beds in our store. The "FarmsteadRaised Garden Bed" is one such product.

http://eartheasy.com/grow_raised_beds.htm

Should we avoid using "raised garden beds" in the anchor text of the internal links pointing to the products in our store because of cannibalization?

We recently changed the anchor text of the internal links to have keywords instead of just "click here" or "more info" - was this a good idea?

What should our optimal anchor text look like?

[RyanKent]

Hi Aran.

A few suggestions regarding your page:

• Your current title tag is "Raised Garden Beds: How to build, and where to buy a raised garden bed or planter | Eartheasy.com". Change it to "Raised Garden Beds | Eartheasy.com". Move the rest into your meta description.

• While you are making this change delete your meta keywords as it is rather large and offers no benefit.

• Your current H1 tag is Eartheasy and your H2 tag is Navigation. Change your large "Raised Garden Beds" message at the top of the page to an H1 tag. Your navigation should not be presented with a H2 tag. The H# tags are page headers indicating important topics discussed on the page. Think of it in terms of newspaper headlines where H1 is the main title.

As to your questions, changing "click here" and similar tags to actual anchor text is a great move.

Cannibalization happens when you have multiple pages on your site competing for the exact same keyword or phrase. As long as you vary the text and remain consistent, you are fine. You can refer to your "Farmstead Raised Garden Bed" page using that phrase as anchor text as long as you always point to the same URL. You are welcome to reuse "raised garden bed" in other anchor text as long as you include another brand or text with it.

[aran088]

Great points.

We used to rank #1 on Google for "Raised Garden Beds" forever, until just a few days ago and now we are last on page 2. If you look at everyone who outranks us they are a bit more specific with page title.

Why would reducing the amount of information in the page title help us, when the top dogs seem to be doing otherwise?

[RyanKent]

There are over 200 factors that ultimately determine a page's ranking. A page could choose to not follow many of them and still rank well. In your case it seems Sunset ranks as #1 which is largely due to their very strong DA and PA. Yours is good, there's is better.

With respect to the title, it is given a weighting based on how many words it contains and the position of the words. When you add additional words to your title, your weight is diluted amongst those other words. Your focus is not as strong and you will not rank as well.

As I look at your site I see other opportunities for improvement. Some of your alt text may be seen as inappropriate such as "Build your own raised garden bed with anchor and stacking joints". The ALT tag is supposed to offer you an opportunity to describe the picture in a few words.

Your site also has 9400+ bold characters on the page. That is definitely too much. You can use CSS or other means to make the text appear darker. Bold should be used for words which need to stand out on the page. If you use bold for the entire page, a search engine will most likely view it negatively and at best disregard the weight and at worst penalize you for abuse.

[aran088]

Thanks for these observations! This page as well as many on the site are legacy pages from 10 years ago which do not adhere to modern best practices, and the bold characters and header mis-use are great examples.

[aran088]

The one thing that contradicts with this is that SEOmoz report cards keep stating that our anchor text on links is considered cannibalization. How do we "modify our anchor text" without using "raised beds" or "raised garden beds" and risk this issue of cannibaliation?

"buy a raised bed", "raised garden beds", "Composite Timber Raised Beds", "Cedar Raised Beds", "Farmstead Raised Beds", "Cedar rectangular raised beds", "raised beds and supplies", and "Complete Raised Garden Bed Kits"

Explanation

It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is just fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine).

Recommendation

Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match

[RyanKent]

The "explanation" offered in your message is perfect.

Please provide the URL for the page along with the keyword you used.

[aran088]

"raised beds"

eartheasy.com/grow_raised_beds.htm

[RyanKent]

I am not certain of the mechanics of exactly how the tool works. Please change the page title as I suggested then you and I can try running the tool again and see if the results change.

The words in your title are supposed to indicate your targeted keywords. All those extra words could be confusing the tool.