Link text

[Hardley111]

Can anyone give me any advise regarding anchor text in back links on external sites. I have about 8 bloggers reviewing our products on their sites. When they link to our site, they either use the words of our company name or something like “click here”  as the words in the link.

There are a few key words that we are wanting to improve for so should those words be made as the live link on their site?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Always think about: would it be normal if they would link to a page on my site with that kind of anchor link. If the answer would be yes because the link text will be the same as the product name then it's OK. I would always be very cautious with this. This is something we used to call rich anchor text spam if you would take this the wrong way and try to get all your links with the anchor text fully related to your page.

Hope this helps!

[CommT]

Hello,

You are better off not getting keyword rich anchors these days. I wouldn't change a thing if I was you. Google isn't happy by this type of link (apparently it's a 'bought' link even though no money has changed hands), so you're better off making sure it looks as natural as possible.

Best wishes,

Amelia

[Hardley111]

HI Amelia,

Ok so with that in mind, if I were to have a word to a link, that was related to the page on my site in terms of topic and content, would that be alright from a Google perspective?

Thanks,

Pete

[WesleySmits]

As Martijn said before me it's very important that the anchor text is natural. Nowadays Google also looks at surrounding text so the actual anchor text has lost it's value. I would recommend that your bloggers link better than they do now. A click here link is indeed not the best approach.

The company name should be find if it's to the homepage, but for a product page it would be better to use the product name or something relevant. (Nimbus 2000 VS Broom for example)

Don't over optimize though. Google doesn't like manipulators, just let your reviewers make up the anchor texts. Most you can do is to ask them to place the link in a more appropriate sentence than 'click here'.