“SEO is dead!” “Anchor text is dead as well”. If you are related to the SEO scene in any way, I’m sure that you have lost count of the times that you’ve heard or read these two statements on a blog post. These statements have also been proven to be wrong over and over again. And today, Search engine optimisation is more alive than ever before. As for Anchor text, it isn’t dead, but on a feeding tube.
The last time the above two statements made “headlines” in SEO news sources was back in April 2012. In the spring of 2012, Google released a new update for its search algorithm named “Penguin”. The company claimed that the main goal of penguin update was to fight link-spam. In other words, the update was focused on penalising the websites that were over optimised. And it was said that this update would impact websites with poor anchor text diversity.
The meaning of having a poor anchor text diversity is having a lot of backlinks into a website with the same link text. According to Google, this was a good indicator of trying to fabricate search results using unnatural backlinks. For a long time, search engines used anchor texts on a website as indicators of what the website was about. This meant that having a lot of backlinks with the same anchor text helped websites to rank better for the search queries performed for that text. So some of the spammers tried to use it for their advantage by spamming all over the web with links, featuring exact same anchor text. And this is when Google decided to use having a large number of backlinks with exact match anchor text as an indication of link-spam, as it wasn’t natural.
The best way to avoid getting caught for abusing anchor text links and being penalised is building a natural link portfolio. And having a natural link portfolio means diversifying your incoming links. Don’t use the exact same keyword for every link you make. Here are some methods that will help you in making your backlinks look more natural.
- Use the plain URL – www.yoursite.com
- Use your brand name as the anchor text
- Use “Click here”, “Visit my website” and “Read more” as anchor texts
- Use long key phrases as anchor text
Mix up the above four methods when you are making backlinks to your website, and you will also be able to avoid any future penalties put forth by Google and other search engines for link-spamming.