Too Many Incoming Links With The Same Anchor Text?
BREAKING NEWS:
“Hi Duncan, Just one question: “When linking back to your own site(s) from another website, does it damage your search engine ranking to have too many of the same anchor text pointing to your site?” ~ Brad Dolley
Hi Brad,
No, quite the opposite in fact.
The more focused you are on a specific keyword term; the more “theme relevancy” is going to be passed back to the website / page you’re linking to via the anchor text used. The result will be a much better chance of obtaining better search engine rankings for that term.
Here’s something that might interest you…
Several weeks ago “website X” was ranking approximately in position #670 for the highly competitive phrase “keyword term”.
I’m sorry about not being able to reveal the specific domain or keyword term (it’s a two word term) but the information is extremely sensitive and the market is one of the most fiercely competitive markets online – search engine optimization wise.
To give you some idea a broad search on the term in Google returns over 140 million results. An exact search on the term (searching with the terms in quotes) returns over 40 million results. So it’s pretty competitive – about twice as competitive as “online casino”.
Over the period of 6 weeks a total of 4,124 incoming links (using the keyword term in question as anchor text) were generated and “live” – that is linking back to the website and being able to be discovered by the search engines.
Over that same 6 week period the website moved from approximately position #670 to #183 to #69 to #18. It is currently fluctuating between #12 and #18 in Google for the term as I write this and should increase further as those links mature a little more.
These links are NOT from related websites, but they do use relevant anchor text on those websites. What I mean by that is that all of those links are an exact match of the keyword term in question but the websites are not necessarily related to the term in question (or even the overall theme of the market).
As you can see, that’s a lot of links to have, all with the same anchor text but it’s doing no damage whatsoever. Quite the opposite.
Having said all of that, and so people don’t get the wrong idea, I wouldn’t recommend making all of your incoming links have the exact same anchor text.
First that just doesn’t look natural at all to the search engines.
I’m not saying they check for this as a possible indication of manipulation, but just that whenever you’re doing search engine optimization (internal or external) you always want to make things look as natural as possible.
Secondly you can generate a better impact for your overall set of target keyword terms (and respective search engine rankings by association) by using a variety of anchor text terms.
Let’s say you want to rank for 3 terms.
The primary term being “dog training”.
The secondary terms being “dog training advice” and “dog training techniques”.
You’re going to need more incoming links with the anchor text “dog training” simply because it’s more competitive than the other two and harder to rank well for.
However every time you generate a link back to your website using either of the latter two keyword terms, you’re also passing theme relevancy for the “dog training” theme as a whole.
This is because both of those terms contain the core term “dog training”.
So at the end of the day you’ll need less incoming links for “dog training”, and you’re also gaining relevancy for the other two terms also. So it does make sense to mix things up a bit.
Given the scale of competitiveness between those 3 terms mentioned I would generally apply it in a ratio of about 60:20:20. So 60% of the anchor text for the links with “dog training”; 20% for “dog training advice” and; 20% for “dog training techniques”.
If you have more keyword terms that your targeting (and you shouldn’t just limit yourself to 3), you need to juggle things a bit differently but that should give you the general idea of how things are applied for best affect.
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As a web developer I created a PHP script that uses an array of 12 keywords to select from as the anchor text. So that I do not limit myself down to the same anchor text coming back to my site 100′s of times. Everytime the page is visited a fresh 1 in 12 keyword is selected. – The same when Google cache the web page.
There is some great information on this site, but what I would really like to know is how to generate over 4000 incoming links from other sites within six weeks AND control what the anchor text says. That would be cool!