Generic Anchor Text -VS- Keyword Anchor Text

I've read a lot of posts here, including in the marketplace, and I've noticed some people talk about wanting 70% - 80% generic anchor text and the rest as prime keyword anchor text, and I'm having trouble understanding why. Wouldn't it be more like 50/50?

As I'm writing some articles for Ezine, I'm trying to determine what anchor text to use for those 2 links they allow and I'm having a hard time using "click here" as anchor text because it seems like such a waste. Is it really necessary to use generic anchor text as much, if not more than the keyword anchor text?

Mooseboy,

While some people may have their own motivations for what they want, in general it is good to have a diverse backlink profile with a smaller amount of exact match terms as anchor text in relation to overall links to the site. The reason is because having most or even half of your inbound links configured using keywords that a webmaster is targeting looks suspicious. Technically, Google doesn't want anyone making a link manually however that obviously doesn't (and probably shouldn't) happen. When people build links to websites naturally, they rarely stop and say "hey, I'll bet this guy would love it if I used furnace installation Dallas" as anchor text to link to his heating and cooling site. When links happen naturally, they typically use just the domain or some other obscure configuration. In linkbuilding, its all about getting high quality links without leaving a footprint.

http://www.searchenginepartner.com/seo-footprints.html

Hope that answers your question,

Shawn

That makes a lot of sense.

I guess my confusion is trying to figure out how Google actually expects most sites to be able to naturally adhere to these requirements. I could understand if you were running a celebrity gossip site, which can be updated with new garbage on an hourly basis and spread across the internet by millions of people who actually give a ****, but what about a website for a plumbing company or a site that sells greeting cards....how much is their content going to be spread across the internet due to it being so original and helpful? But these sites still need to rank high, and it's not like their service or product is any less worthwhile...so why penalize them if they have to utilize these SEO/SEM techniques??

mooseboy said:

That makes a lot of sense.

I guess my confusion is trying to figure out how Google actually expects most sites to be able to naturally adhere to these requirements. I could understand if you were running a celebrity gossip site, which can be updated with new garbage on an hourly basis and spread across the internet by millions of people who actually give a ****, but what about a website for a plumbing company or a site that sells greeting cards....how much is their content going to be spread across the internet due to it being so original and helpful? But these sites still need to rank high, and it's not like their service or product is any less worthwhile...so why penalize them if they have to utilize these SEO/SEM techniques??

Click to expand...

Well, Google is a bot which has to crawl through hundred of millions of site, so there is no way it can tell legit site from crappy site. SO everything is treated the same until the legit site starts building trust which is by using generic anchor texts.

70-80% generic text is quite a huge. 40-60 is a good ratio where 60% being general anchor texts link click here etc etc..

I cover all metrics and ratios in a LOT of depth in this video series:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/499970-understanding-link-building-diversity-anchor-text-profiles-post-penguin-videos.html

...And just so you know, I have thousands of SEO clients with many tens of thousands of URLs, and work with huge data-sets, so the ratios discussed are based on proper research.

jascoken, you are one of those, who knows what exactly hey are speaking. Your knowledge on SEO is amazing, and your videos a MUST WATCH. Have me as your student plz.

Market Samurai posted a useful video yesterday explaining how they see the way to go with anchor text etc. Well worth watching

http://content.noblesamurai.com/backlink-healthcheck-tool/

I absolutely agree with this rule. This aims to prevent your site from Google penalty. You know that if main KW appear lots in each post, it will be easy for Google find out the footprint. Combining all main keyword and generic keywords will make the post look natural.

There are pretty good posts here. I've also been wondering what's the exact percentage of keyword anchor text. This is really useful since the penguin era.