Search Engine Watch Says Don't Use Anchors Like "Click Here"

[zartania]

Interesting read over at Search Engine Watch. The author is saying is an SEO no-no to have non-descriptive anchors. That boat has left and he's still on the dock.

Good stats on the types of anchors typical though. For those looking at what levels of diversity to use this may help.

http://searchenginewatch.com/articl...ontent=How the Web Uses Anchor Text in Links [Study]&utm_campaign=03%2F27%2F12%20-%20SEW%20Daily&utm_source=Search%20Engine%20Watch%20Daily&utm_medium=Email

 

[cocococo]

so many fecking speculation here man, Just let the google bullshit die down and test your method and learn from the past mistake and go on about your business, am sick now of hearing bulls cock on so many site now.

 

[aftershock2020]

Interesting read over at Search Engine Watch. The author is saying is an SEO no-no to have non-descriptive anchors. That boat has left and he's still on the dock.

Good stats on the types of anchors typical though. For those looking at what levels of diversity to use this may help.

http://searchenginewatch.com/articl...ontent=How the Web Uses Anchor Text in Links [Study]&utm_campaign=03%2F27%2F12%20-%20SEW%20Daily&utm_source=Search%20Engine%20Watch%20Daily&utm_medium=Email

Haven't used " click here " in a website in a few years.

Just target your content with the keyword as the anchor tag and link RELEVANT content to it and don't sweat it.

 

[Coffee King]

Wouldn't 'Click Here' look more natural? As well as links with no anchor text?
Of course you'll want relevant keywords too, but I'll still be using variations of click here.

 

[nikao]

Wouldn't 'Click Here' look more natural? As well as links with no anchor text?
Of course you'll want relevant keywords too, but I'll still be using variations of click here.

and why would that be exactly? Isn't 'click here' something of the internet in the nineties? Should we bring back animated gifs and under construction pages as well?

In my opinion the web has matured significantly and one of things has changed is the way we link to things. We use descriptive text. Only thing that we still see is 'Read More', but most of the time along with the title being a link.

Ohw.. and 1 really important thing. Aren't 90% of the 'click here' links supposed to be internal links? How many external sites/blogs/whatever do you know who link to your content using 'click here'??? a url maybe, but most often it is the title, which is keyword optimized.

 

[aftershock2020]

Wouldn't 'Click Here' look more natural? As well as links with no anchor text?
Of course you'll want relevant keywords too, but I'll still be using variations of click here.

It depends entirely on the situation.

If you are writing content in a site and you suggest to the reader to go somewhere, you can write something like:

" Checkout keyword as an example of what I mean..."

That keyword links to your suggested tool/product/service and leads them to a sales page with content about that relevant, niche targeted topic tool/product/service.


This does two things...

$ Gives you a link in your content to that keyword, following through to your sales site, giving both authority and linkjuice.

$ Gives you access to a less direct and more suggestive/passive sales approach.

This is article/review marketing 101 stuff that happens to cross over into an seo situation.

Again, it depends all in how you present your content, link and offer in the situation.

 

[grav6]

The guy mentions garbage about click here, then someone in the comments pointed out that it's more natural and in response he wrote, "Good point. It is important to have a natural link graph and avoid over optimization." This just really invalidates what he wrote in the article about it.

Put yourself in the shoes of a user and not an "SEO". What are you going to write? What do your totally non-SEO friends write in text messages, email, Instant Message, etc, when they send you a link? Is your every day person going to write a keyword optimised anchor text when referencing your site? If you're not sure, then get some friends and family members (who know absolutely zero about SEO) to write how they would phrase it.

 

[Gormagor]

In my opinion, the most natural-looking link available is the raw link:

http://www.blackhatworld.com

While 'click here' is still used as an anchor in some informal forum posts, I can't think of many instances beyond that. Professional blog posts, articles, and so on certainly wouldn't use it, if only because it encourages readers to click on a page that will - in all likelihood - belong to another site. Contextual anchors are comparatively unobtrusive.

 

[psytrance]

yeah if you build 10 links /day you dont need to use "click here" "read more" etc etc.

But if you are building 1000 links a day to your site you MUST use many anchor texts. Those people are WH suckers and dont know a shit about SEO...

 

[BLIXX]

lol Search Engine Land... by-and-large, content for content's sake over there. Its like an inebriated SeoMoz.

... Put yourself in the shoes of a user and not an "SEO". What are you going to write? What do your totally non-SEO friends write in text messages, email, Instant Message, etc, when they send you a link? Is your every day person going to write a keyword optimised anchor text when referencing your site? If you're not sure, then get some friends and family members (who know absolutely zero about SEO) to write how they would phrase it.

Great point. It can be hard for SEOs to get into the mental space required to stop trying to speak "search engine" when link building, and to realize that search engines are increasingly trying to speak the language(s) of human beings (e.g. Google's continued attempts to gain mastery of the semantic Web).

 

[jon_xx_x]

Maybe I read it wrong, but I think he's trying to say "click here" is not beneficial to ranking your site, and he wasn't actually keeping in mind of having a natural link profile. They talk about it in the third comment after the article.

 

[BLIXX]

Maybe I read it wrong, but I think he's trying to say "click here" is not beneficial to ranking your site, and he wasn't actually keeping in mind of having a natural link profile. They talk about it in the third comment after the article.

If that is indeed what he is saying its one more reason to only read SEL whilst on the toilet.

Links and their value are calculated both qualitatively and quantitatively. If a page has a majority of raw URLs as links to it, but a sufficient number of exact and tertiary-matching keywords also pointing to the URL, raw URLs and even nebulous anchors (e.g. "visit site") used as anchor text assist in the algorithmic evaluation of the keyword-specific anchors also pointing to the URL, so long as the content on the page to which all of these links point jives semantically with the more specific anchors. Ergo, why on-site SEO is also important, and works concomitantly with one's off-site efforts.

wut.

 

[madara1234]

I still use them from time to time to vary my link profile.

 

[elvis1973]

It depends on how you look at this and how you belive that Google interprets the data that it collects.

Does it look for "normal" patterns and then use this in its ranking metrics???, does it look at the BIG authority sites such as the BBC, CNN etc and monitor their link diversity and then use this data as a bench mark against others?? I think that the search engines each have their own list of trusted sites who they use for bench marking what is "normal"

I think for most people using terms like "click here" is not a case of them believing they will increase their sites rank i think most of the discussion on here lately is about having natural anchor diversity. It just isn't natural for all you backlinks to be an exact match keyword.

so adding in "click here" and "more info" is just about keeping a solid mix in your anchor diversity profile, not about if it will actually help your rankings, more about not hurting them.

In fact I don't really think it matters what words you use to diversify the mix, it just shouldn't lean too heavily towards one or the other.

• If you are linking to a video then you may link from the phrase "watch this"
  
• if you are linking from a news passage then you may use "further reading"
  
• There would be links from images & videos
  
• There would be several variations of URL links

 

[nimmivh]

I dont believe in it, natural links from the normal peoples will be "here" or "check here" or "as said in here" etc , Surely these kind of links will improve the domain authority.

 

[psytrance]

Maybe I read it wrong, but I think he's trying to say "click here" is not beneficial to ranking your site, and he wasn't actually keeping in mind of having a natural link profile. They talk about it in the third comment after the article.

are you saying that a "click here" link in an article optimized for your keyword is not beneficial to ranking a site?

 

[xgf666]

Once, I came across a very serious article about " telling people what to do", to summarize, the click rate of link like "click here" is very much important than of a descriptive link. That might counterbalance the SEO effect...

 

[nYXem]

I think it depends. Often "Click here" or "Click this" type of anchors may look natural, like in blog comments. Keyword anchors in comments seem more unnatural to me. Though personally speaking, I've never used such anchors, I always attack the relevant keywords, whether it works or not.

 

[florflor]

Think about "click here". It's what marketers write.

Real surfers almost never hyperlink "click here".

They're more likely to copy and paste the entire link and letting it auto-hyperlink, and most likely on a forum.

Think natural people.

 

[manny521]

i think you can use "click here" as one of your de-optimized anchors but you should also have a list of a few hundred others like "find out more info" "read the related article"...etc...

be creative with it and you can build yourself a very large list of de-optimized anchor text...

and use lots of naked urls too...and if your website/company has a brand name, use that more than anything...