Is Your Anchor Text Strategy Hurting or Helping Your Search Engine Rankings?

There are  few strategies in link building that are as important as developing a natural looking backlink profile.  Deploying a well thought out anchor text strategy is crucial for obtaining and maintaining strong keyword rankings.  Using keywords in the anchor text of your backlinks is one of the most powerful tools in a link builders arsenal; however, as with many things in life, with such power one must exercise great responsibility.  Deploying the wrong anchor text strategy can quickly reverse the positive effects of any link building campaign.

Google understands that one of the easiest and most powerful ranking factors to game in its algorithm is the anchor text contained in your backlinks.  As expected, they are becoming increasingly diligent in their efforts to  detect artificial anchor text patterns.  If a large portion of new backlinks pointing to your site are using the same anchor text, there is a good chance that Google’s algorithms will detect it and lower your overall trust score.  If your website’s trust score lowers significantly enough you will likely see a decrease in the velocity of your ranking improvements.  Once your trust score falls below a certain threshold, you may see very few ranking improvements or in the worst case you may lose rankings.

While it is possible to obtain quick rankings by targeting only a few keywords, the benefits will be short-term. The more aggressive you become in building links to a small number of individual keywords the more likely you will lower your trust score and see lowered returns on your link building efforts.

How aggressive should you be and what is the proper anchor text strategy?

There is not one simple answer to this question.  However, TLB’s account managers are highly trained in research, data analysis and strategy development.  Determining the proper anchor text strategy for our clients is something we do every day.  Here are a couple of points to consider when building your strategy:

• How old/established is your site?
  • Older more established sites with natural looking backlink profiles can be more aggressive with their link building because they typically have higher trust scores
• How many links are you building per month on quality sites?
  • Increase the number and density of keyword-targeted links and branded links each month in order to establish an increasing link popularity trend in your backlink profile. If you notice your competitors being much more aggressive and successful with keyword-driven anchor text, up the number in your profile, but do not attempt to outdo them. Remember, you are in this for the long haul.
  • In general, building a large amount of links in a short time period is not, in itself, risky as long as they are quality links and you are utilizing the right anchor text strategy. Look to build links on sites that do not have paid links that standout (in sidebars, footers, etc…) and webmasters are not monetizing them with irrelevant text link ads with highly commercialized anchor text. Hint: Use branded keywords often when building large amounts of links.
• How does your anchor text profile compare to that of your competitors?
  • Use OpenSiteExplorer.org to look at the anchor text distribution of your top ranking competitors.  If most of your competitors have commercial keywords as the majority of their anchor texts (versus branded keywords such as their site names), then you can be a bit more aggressive in targeting individual anchor texts.
  • Keep in mind that just because your competitor may have a high density of commercial keywords as their top anchor texts, it does not mean that they did it overnight.
• How many branded keywords exist in your backlink profile?
  • With recent changes to Google’s algorithm, it is becoming apparent that they are expecting to see  a higher percentage of branded links versus keyword based links.
    • For example, in most industries it is very common to see a companies name or their website URL (and many variations thereof) as the anchor text for the majority of their links.  Most natural links do not contain commercial keywords for anchor text.  Keep this in mind while building links; the more branded links you build the more aggressive you can be with keyword-based links.

One of the concepts we stress most to our clients is to be patient. Trying to build too many links and targeting too few anchor texts in a short period is only asking for trouble.  You may see great rankings initially but it will become increasingly difficult over time to move your rankings higher if your trust score is falling.  As always, we are here to help you navigate these complex waterways.