How to Use Anchor Text in Backlinks

What's the best way to use anchor text to gain the best possible rankings from your link popularity campaign? Read on for tips and insight from the "SEO Guy" Morgan Carey into questions such as how Google views your vote for a site when you link to it and how they determine the value of your vote.


Read the full article here: How to Use Anchor Text in Backlinks

For more discussion go here: Blog Article Discussion

Thank you Morgan Carey. That was a really informative read. i 've found useful for my link building campaign.

I've one Question,

I have heard that google will penalize a site with many anchor text link with the same keyword pointing on the same page. How far is it true? IF it is true than how many same anchor text link will it be sufficient to get high SERPS and also not penalized?

Ummm just so we are clear Morgan Carey = SEO Guy

Now, I would not say so much that it draws an automatic penalty as there are many instances when tons of links would naturally say the same thing and have nothing to do with SEO at all, take the keyword "walmart" for instance http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=allinanchor%3Awalmart

Because they are walmart I highly doubt they are actively SEOing, they just dont need to, so I am thinking TONS of the links if not 90+ % are all going to the index page saying "walmart" does it mean they get a penalty? Of course not they are walmart, its their name even if it were 100% links going to walmart with kw phrase walmart they would still be #1

However what a high density of same anchors to same page does do is raise a flag to possible seo activity when a manual evaluation of a site is occuring, now this isnt saying Google is anti SEO because they clearly arent or they wouldnt be speaking at the advanced link building seminars etc, but they are just making sure a porn site is not getting #1 in allinanchor: for hte keyword jesus just to capture the traffic by blog spamming and guestbooks.

The #1 reason to go for varied anchor text is because you have more then one keyword, it just makes sense! And deeplinking is the same thing, got lots of topics you got lots of pages they each have their own kw's so they each get their own links and own anchor text specific to that page

Thank you for my questions reply "SEO GUY". I'm sure that i've got the perfect answer.

Hey SEO Guy, thanks for the great article. I have a couple questions that I have been wondering about for some time. Let's say I get a few links from another website. Their custom is to link with the business name as anchor text or with the URL as anchor text. They will not help me out with different anchor text.

1) Imagine that my domain is www.widgethouse.com and they link to me with "Widgets House" as anchor text. Unfortunately "Widgets House" isn't a keyword that I am after. Do you think that I get any credit for the keyword "Widgets" with that link text?

2) Second.... if they link to me with my URL as link text "http:www.widgetshouse.com" does that help me much for searches on "widgets"?

Thanks!

interesting post seo guy.

Although I will probably get blasted for this, I would say the answer to both is no. (Or at very least a LOT less)

Here is my thinking, for allinanchor: to be increased for a specific keyword you need that exact keyword to be in the anchor text of the link you recieve thus equating allinanchor: and the actual serps for competitive industries is possible. If people links to me with "SEO Guy" or www.seo-guy.com as the anchor text does my allinanchor: for SEO go up? I believe it does not. So that is why I answer no.

This is not to say that the links are useless however, you see there are still other factors to consider. I beleive search engines like to see variation in the anchor text of a site, thus a link to www.seo-guy.com with the domain as anchor text contributes to that link anchor diversity, also there still is weight (although greatly depricated) to PR and each link contributes PR, also I beleive (As most of us do) that the more unique websites linking to you, the more of an authority you are considered (No matter what the anchor text) all of which (Although not as powerful as anchor text) contribute to a domains ranking ability.

In order to test the this www.seo-guy.com not counting towards allinanchor:seo hypothesis, I think we should all link to http://www.seo-guy.com using the domain as the anchor, I am currently #6-8 for allinanchor:SEO if my rank goes goes up then I guess I am wrong ;) (SHAMELESS! SEO GUY SHAMELESS!)

Haha whatever still a legit test

Haha, I got halfway through your reply and I was like "Well lets just all change our links to your site to not use 'SEO' as anchor text and see what happens." I guess I should've read to the end first.

Yes but it'd be better to have the exact keyword in the anchor text

Not at all. Google cannot recognize "widgets" in the "word" "widgetshouse".

If I'm wrong on this last point, please give me an example.

Best,
PR Weaver

Thanks for the reply SEO Guy. I appreciate your thinking on that. I guess I'll have to be happy with the link diversity that I am getting from these sites. I was greedy and hoping for more!


PRweaver....
Here is an example... google will isolate single terms out of a domain name - if you search google for "quark" you will see that it highlights the "quark" in the domains of "quarkexpeditions.com" and "quarkbiotech.com"

This obviously works from the "search" direction but I don't know if google scans domain names for keywords on the "crawl" side of things.

EGOL, I'm convinced that the highlights in Google results pages don't have anything in common with what Google uses for ranking purposes.

I don't think that Google treats domain names differently from other text. If you want some words to be counted, you must use a valid separator. The "empty" separator is not a good separator. In your example, Google finds quarkexpeditions.com and quarkbiotech.com because theses pages contain the word "quark" in the body. Even if you can't use any underscore in domain names, note that the underscore is not considered as a valid separator by Google.

Best,
PR Weaver

Egol, I am of the opinion it is 2 technologies, being able to embolden a particular occurence of characters together is something WAY easier then being able to parse relevance and meaning from 2 conjoined words Check out this thread, we covered it a bit http://www.seo-guy.com/forum/showthread.php?p=7029#post7029

Thanks for the thread SEO-guy. Interesting.

Thanks for the article SEO GUY. Can you tell me how all of this applies to internal linking with keywords. For example, I've read that it's a good idea to link back to your index page from other internal pages with your keywords rather than say the word 'Home'. Does Google look positively on this?

Thanks
Bluesuit

Links within your own site should follow whatever is going to help your user navigate the best, dont go keyword loading a link just for an SE, however if it does make sense to use a kw as the anchor text to a page (Your home page for example) I certainly think it is worth doing as it does help your allinanchor score, as my good friend Zoolander used to say, dont get SEO tunnelvision, your traffic increase is 10% your conversion drop is 20% because you had to hurt your site to make it rank, doesnt make sense