Unreliable Witness
Senior Member
- Apr 21, 2016
- 837
- 627
From what I have been seeing for the past few years, I really don't think that anchors have much of an effect on SEO. The rule of "strong links exact, weak links brand" is a total crap imo. Benefit from it is minimal and you can easily overoptimize yourself. Risk:reward ratio is catastrophic. Read this for example - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-i-made-500k-organic-visitors-monthly.966269/
I 100% agree with this. As soon as you start to use keywords in your anchor text, you risk an over-optimisation penalty. Anchor text has been abused so much in the past that I think that other than looking at it to detect possible spam, Google pretty much ignores it.
I think I'm safer building predominantly brand variants and URL anchor text, and optimising for keywords in the URL and the content of the target page.