Anchor Text - Are You Doing it Right?

[CliveTheSnail]

HELP! - HELP! - HELP!

Hi, great post and something I WISH I had read and learned prior to getting links built, I did 100% new links built on exact anchor text... #sadpanda

Question....

I've had my website for almost 7 years, mostly ranking spots 2 - 4 for main target keywords while doing little to no SEO, even beating out YELP for a lot of them. That being said, over the past year, 3 to 4 local competitors have hired SEO companies or started to do SEO themselves as my rankings went from 2 - 3 to then positions 6 - 9.

SIDE NOTE: FOR MANY YEARS there has been a small (but bigger than mine) local company that I just cant seem to beat for position #1 on any of our industries local keywords...None... I have checked AHREF'S and gained most of their links, hasn't really helped at all, I have NO CLUE what they are doing to Rank So Well...

Long story short... I built several links to my site, focusing on home page and exact match keywords (main city's service location) hoping to get that rank 1 spot... Not only that, but I sent several exact match keywords to a new page, a page that targets another city we just started to do services in as well (two cities total). My on-page SEO and web design is MONEY, so I've been told by several SEO savvy people... Yes I know rank 1 isn't everything...but in my industry, a service industry people go with the first company that answers the phone, and looking at the company's traffic in position #1 compared to positions #2 and #3...it would 10x - 15x business for just 2 main key words, not to mention the lower searched 4 - 5 keywords that could increase it to 20x - 30x current business volume

OK... SO... It's Safe to say I got a major Google Algorithm Penalty as rankings dropped from spots 3 - 4 for my homepage to spots 10 - 13+ ... And even worse, on the new city's page, spots 18 - 22 to positions 45 + .... I have since contacted the company(s) that provided links over the past 45 - 65 days, and they have notified myself that all links were completely removed within the past 24 hours from this post - One even offered a refund without me asking or expecting is it was my lack of knowledge and error... (Thank You).

I guess MY QUESTIONS IS... Will my site fully, partially, or never recover??

If it eventually will at some point, what time frame am I looking at from BHW members experience? I understand there are a lot of variables to consider...

Also, once recovered... HOW can I rank for position #1...

Cheers,
-Dandy

 

[mr.vmehta]

thanks you, for rank site in very short time anchor text method is best

 

[fb3003]

I see so many people buying SEO and over optimizing their anchor texts.

Don't do that.

Add in generics, LSIs, brand names, naked urls, mentions (the url without a hyperlink) and even competitors' anchors.

You will be much better off if you are trying to rank a site for the long term.

Here's some generics you can use (not mine as I found the online somewhere). If you are going to use the list mix them up so you are not using the same generic anchors for all your {sites|links}.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/a6w435unlm2uamv/generic_KWs.xlsx/file

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/3...e39a562f3c17c980f816d28d9ea97535034/detection

i have noticed that over the last 12 months or so, google is giving more credit to exact match back links. have you noticed this? at least that has been my observation in my niche.

 

[BassTrackerBoats]

i have noticed that over the last 12 months or so, google is giving more credit to exact match back links. have you noticed this? at least that has been my observation in my niche.

I'm really not seeing that and in fact have my clients on a pretty heavy dose of non exacts.

It could be your niche or it could be Google, as a southpaw, throwing a curve ball spinning at 3,000 RPMs to a lefty batter causing him to step in the bucket.

I'd love to hear some others' thoughts on that as well.

 

[fb3003]

I'm really not seeing that and in fact have my clients on a pretty heavy dose of non exacts.

It could be your niche or it could be Google, as a southpaw, throwing a curve ball spinning at 3,000 RPMs to a lefty batter causing him to step in the bucket.

I'd love to hear some others' thoughts on that as well.

let's search on a keyword that we both can related to: florida

according to majestic, here is the break down of top 5 serp result and how "florida" is used as a backlink. This is similar result across other keywords that I search. top results tend to have a lot more exact match backlink compared to the lower serp results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida 60%
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida 72%
https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us.html 11%
https://www.myflorida.com/ 18%
https://www.visitflorida.org/ 5%

 

[berkay1907]

let's search on a keyword that we both can related to: florida

according to majestic, here is the break down of top 5 serp result and how "florida" is used as a backlink. This is similar result across other keywords that I search. top results tend to have a lot more exact match backlink compared to the lower serp results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida 60%
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida 72%
https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us.html 11%
https://www.myflorida.com/ 18%
https://www.visitflorida.org/ 5%

The top 2 results you are referring is wikipedia.org . I wouldn't be surprised if those ratios were %99 . Anyway actually i think Basstracker is not saying that you can't rank with high anchor ratios. He says in the long run it is better and more safe to use a lot of diversity including anchors,generic,brand and naked urls.

 

[fb3003]

The top 2 results you are referring is wikipedia.org . I wouldn't be surprised if those ratios were %99 . Anyway actually i think Basstracker is not saying that you can't rank with high anchor ratios. He says in the long run it is better and more safe to use a lot of diversity including anchors,generic,brand and naked urls.

totally agree with you. in long run, it is better to follow @BassTrackerBoats advice and stay on the safe side as your ratio goes. it is just over the last 12 months, i am doing a lot of random checks across keywords and have noticed the higher than normal ratio for their exact matched anchors for the first position. it is like google has turned the clock on their algorithm to 10 years ago.

 

[SallyF]

i have noticed that over the last 12 months or so, google is giving more credit to exact match back links. have you noticed this? at least that has been my observation in my niche.

Googlers say that they're counting only high-quality backlinks and don't pay attention to others. If SEOs are getting high-quality backlinks in most cases they use exact-match anchor text in order to get more profit from them. These links give improvements not because they're exact-match, but because they're of high-quality.
So I think it's more a causation and correlation issue.

 

[fb3003]

Googlers say that they're counting only high-quality backlinks and don't pay attention to others. If SEOs are getting high-quality backlinks in most cases they use exact-match anchor text in order to get more profit from them. These links give improvements not because they're exact-match, but because they're of high-quality.
So I think it's more a causation and correlation issue.

interesting thinking. very hard to run any sort of single variable testing on what you mentioned though

 

[SallyF]

interesting thinking. very hard to run any sort of single variable testing on what you mentioned though

Sure, you can't check it. Just to take into consideration when analysing competitor's backlink profile.