Changing the anchor text of a big amount of links at once is bad for SEO?

[Sebastian23]

Hi there,

Our service at fotograf.de is a shopsystem for professional photographers. The customers can build their own website with our tool including an onlineshop to sell their pictures.

We have a lot of links from our customers linking to our homepage. The links come from subdomains of our domain and from external domains. We are now thinking about changing the anchor text of half of the links (round about 300.000 links).

Do we have to fear a penalization of Google for changing so many anchor texts at once?

Do we get better rankings if we choose a more optimized anchor text or does this have no effect because most of the links are from subdomains (each customer has its own subdomain) of our domain?

Thanks for answering!

Sebastian

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Sebastian

Probably a bad idea and I would tread very, very carefully with this.

Maybe worth reading this:

http://wpmu.org/wordpress-penguin-google-matt-cutts/

And then this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

And then this:

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/

If these are all sitewide links and you are thinking of loading them up with optimised anchor text to do better for those terms then you may well end up doing the very opposite.

Hope that helps

Marcus

[EGOL]

I am willing to bet that changing 300,000 anchor text links will result in a penguin attack.