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Something I had been pondering with all the new updates and signals Google is looking at, and also considering the fact that many website's overdo internal linking and almost everyone uses exact match anchor text for it. So my question is - is it effect or counter-effective to vary your anchor text for internal links?

If you think its effective, what is a reasonable proportion for exact anchor text match to varied ones.

This is definitely not the best technique to quickly see competition heat as it could be easily misleading. Why? The # of results with certain keyword phrases in title does matter as it does show the # of competitors but what it doesn't show is the authority of those competitors and if they are active as of now, and its anybody's guess what could happen when you go into a fight and without knowing your opponent.

Say, you are optimizing for entertainment/celebrity related keywords, you can do quick 'intitle' search and get quickly scared as it may seem as there is a lot of competition looking at the # of results.. however, if you dig a bit deeper its easy to see that majority of pages are low authority pages and are easy to beat as they do not do heavy optimizing (since entertainment traffic doesn't convert well...which means less $ for optimizing).  So my 2 cents...dig a bit deeper, check the top results in first 2 pages at least and look at their authority. Its worth spending a few hours to  know your enemy before you go against them.. rather than spending months in optimizing later and realizing your enemies are much stronger, more active, aggressive and have deeper pockets.

There will always be some people who can get around that. Fresh proxies, Private proxies - by the time Google has those proxies (if at all) it in their "list", they come with a fresher list of new proxies. Cat and mouse chase.. except there is one cat and too many mice. Anyways, its not something I would recommend.

The easiest way is the black hat way using proxy/ips. I am not sure if it can be necessarily labeled black hat but anyways...

The clean way is to have a direct link to google with the search terms - put it on high traffic pages and ask visitors to click it and find your website.

Firstly you are increasing the search count and also the likelyhood of it getting included in the Auto Suggest list of google.

2nd, you are getting your visitors back.

You can make it interesting like a treasure hunt, give them a discount or a freebie.. to go to Google and be able to find their back.