Link anchor diversity penalty

This happened to me, I got the penalty removed by building "no anchor" links. When most people link naturally, they link to your website URL without anchor text. Google knows that about 30% of the natural links have no anchor text... as a result, build these links! And yes, adding synonyms, spinning the anchor text, and creating diversity will also help remove your penalty.

HOWEVER:
Google is de-valuing nonrelevant backlinks, backlinks from site that do not match the content on your site. If at all possible, make sure some of the diversity comes from relevant sites.

PartyNeon said:

This happened to me, I got the penalty removed by building "no anchor" links. When most people link naturally, they link to your website URL without anchor text. Google knows that about 30% of the natural links have no anchor text... as a result, build these links! And yes, adding synonyms, spinning the anchor text, and creating diversity will also help remove your penalty.

HOWEVER:
Google is de-valuing nonrelevant backlinks, backlinks from site that do not match the content on your site. If at all possible, make sure some of the diversity comes from relevant sites.

Click to expand...

Can you tell us what kind of penalty you had,

was it an Unnatural links penalty in GWT tools?

Did you submit a reconsideration request?

If you got a warning, when did you get it and how long did it last

What did you say in your reconsideration request

How did google respond?

There are a lot of people, including me, who are urgently seeking answers to these questions so if you have had some luck then please share it with us and dont spare the detail.

I think that link diversity needs to go even further. I wrote a post on my thoughts about this earlier today:

Apologies for the shameless promotion:


I think that rotating just searchable keywords is not going to be good long term moving forward, I've been analysing a lot of sites ranking in the 1 and 2 spot and they have tonnes of brand and varied anchor text and not just keywords from the Google keyword tool.

Stu784 said:

I think that link diversity needs to go even further. I wrote a post on my thoughts about this earlier today:

Apologies for the shameless promotion:

Code:

http://www.stulong.com/googles-algorithm/google-to-hit-over-optimised-sites/

I think that rotating just searchable keywords is not going to be good long term moving forward, I've been analysing a lot of sites ranking in the 1 and 2 spot and they have tonnes of brand and varied anchor text and not just keywords from the Google keyword tool.

Click to expand...

Just read your blog post, some interesting stuff on there, I like the categorisation of link diversity you have used, I have been looking for a standardised naming convention for these types of anchors, I think you've got it fairly well covered so im going to run with that.

For people who wont read the post.

Brand
Exact Match
Nested Random
Varied Random
URL's
Noise

Your competitors might just be working harder than you do. Build more backlinks.

Stu784 said:

I think that link diversity needs to go even further. I wrote a post on my thoughts about this earlier today:

Apologies for the shameless promotion:

Code:

http://www.stulong.com/googles-algorithm/google-to-hit-over-optimised-sites/

I think that rotating just searchable keywords is not going to be good long term moving forward, I've been analysing a lot of sites ranking in the 1 and 2 spot and they have tonnes of brand and varied anchor text and not just keywords from the Google keyword tool.

Click to expand...

Nice article - thanks for sharing.

I'm not going to risk pointing SB links at my money site but might do some UAW to try and balance out the anchor text.

Any other ideas to get my rankings back?

use more Brand Links... it owns hardly.

elvis1973 said:

Just read your blog post, some interesting stuff on there, I like the categorisation of link diversity you have used, I have been looking for a standardised naming convention for these types of anchors, I think you've got it fairly well covered so im going to run with that.

For people who wont read the post.

Brand
Exact Match
Nested Random
Varied Random
URL's
Noise

Click to expand...

The chart I used was a starting point and you'd need to adjust the percentages based on how a backlink profile currently looks. I'm using Open Site Explorer to see what links a page has.

cinereus said:

Nice article - thanks for sharing.

I'm not going to risk pointing SB links at my money site but might do some UAW to try and balance out the anchor text.

Any other ideas to get my rankings back?

Click to expand...

If you haven't used UAW on your site I'd recommend you don't as I strongly believe Google knows all about the domains on that particular service.

Why do you think Build My Rank closed their doors? To 1) calm down on the amount of usage and 2) to clean up the sites they have and make them look more natural so they don't get hit by this new over optimisation update.

Here's my theory on anchor text diversity.

By using Google Keywords tools, you have the ability to see traffic patterns for your main keywords and corollaries. I'm thinking that there is a connection between the number of searches performed by users and the number of links on the web with those terms as anchor. Truth be told this is probably the only practical way that Google can know what a "natural" link pattern looks like anyway (by natural I mean consisting only of non-paid, user-generated links of course.)

There's a practical application for this theory. Search for broad matches for your keywords. Remove any branded keywords or completely unrelated terms. Take the relevant traffic numbers and sum them. Then, find the proportion of each keyword and the total amount of combined traffic for all of the keywords. You'll find yourself with a very nice mix of anchor text to work with. Just make any adjustments according to your own preference and you should have a "natural" diversity =P.

It's pretty hard to test this because it's not possible to know who's links are 100% "natural." In my opinion, there probably aren't any totally natural sites out there for most niches. But I think that patterning your link diversity based on search is probably a good place to start.

Stu784 said:

If you haven't used UAW on your site I'd recommend you don't as I strongly believe Google knows all about the domains on that particular service.

Why do you think Build My Rank closed their doors? To 1) calm down on the amount of usage and 2) to clean up the sites they have and make them look more natural so they don't get hit by this new over optimisation update.

Click to expand...

Is there another cheap alternative to UAW then which would be better? What can give me 10 anchors per blast?

Also, what would you recommend between RankJumpers and BuildMyRank?

Stu784 said:

If you haven't used UAW on your site I'd recommend you don't as I strongly believe Google knows all about the domains on that particular service.

Why do you think Build My Rank closed their doors? To 1) calm down on the amount of usage and 2) to clean up the sites they have and make them look more natural so they don't get hit by this new over optimisation update.

Click to expand...

or 3) have their entire network get de-indexed by the big G

cinereus said:

Is there another cheap alternative to UAW then which would be better? What can give me 10 anchors per blast?

Also, what would you recommend between RankJumpers and BuildMyRank?

Click to expand...

I'd recommend using none right now, well at least until the dust settles and the latest changes have been worked out.