Diversifying anchor text question

[activitysuper]

Hi,

I've seen a new article by Dr. Pete on diversifying links for 2013 (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-1-seo-tips-for-2013), now my question is this:

Dr. Pete talks about mixing up the anchor text for links, is so we don't get caught out by Google or actually mixing it has a better impact?

For example:

1. 20 anchor text links targeting just the target term.

2. 20 anchor text links targeting 4 variations of the target term.

Is number 2 recommended so things look natural or does it actually have a better impact on SEO.

Thanks

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi there,

straight answer would be, diversity in the anchor text makes your links look natural and they can have an in-direct positive impact on your SEO efforts overall.

Anchor text diversity will not have a direct impact (positive) for your SEO efforts as the search engines will not be able to relate the text in the anchor with that of the landing page's content.

But anchor text diversity will have an in-direct positive impact because of the fact that the search engines will see or feel your links growing naturally with varied anchor text which is the case with super authority big websites on the Internet. Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[Webmaster_SEO]

IMO, Anchor text diversification has a lot to do with your niche market and industry. For instances, in your industry if all the sites ranking on top have very targeted anchor text with no major diversification as such then you might want to take that route while if sites in your industry have unrelated (with respect to keywords targeted) anchor text - like brand names, click here, read more then you should work in that direction because you might play but cannot compete in soccer while wearing tennis shoes.

[TommyTan]

Hi,

I see it that diversifying the anchor text will make things look more natural instead of looking like trying to target a specific keyword.  Furthermore, by mixing up the anchor text linking to the a targeted page, you are targeting multiple keywords that are related to that page.  Hopefully, that page can be ranked for multiple keywords.