When it comes to the relationship between anchor texts and Google Penguin updates, the rule is very simple: follow Google’s guidelines and don’t try to fool the system using anchor text practices too aggressive. Sooner or later, Google will come up with a new update that will negatively impact your actions.
SEO Anchor Text Optimization: Best Practices
Avoid over-optimization
Google does not like overly optimized anchor texts. Keyword-based anchor text is a big red flag for Google. It indicates rough handling, which obviously results in penalties.
Instead, try to keep your anchor text natural by distributing it across your inbound links in the right proportions. For example, instead of placing “web marketing agency” in each guest post, try using something like “Most Trusted Web Marketing Agencies.”
Keep the link natural and qualitative – Important rule for an SEO link anchor
According to Google, every part of any site, including links and associated anchor text, should provide real value to users. Links should only be placed where users expect to see them, so they can benefit from real added value.
With Google’s algorithms getting smarter every year, you should avoid multiple repetitive anchors based on keywords that you are particularly targeting. Any failure to comply with this obligation will result in a penalty.
Of course, you should link to high-quality and relevant pages and disavow all links to low-quality and irrelevant web pages. Getting links from sites with high Domain Authority, Page Authority and Trust Flow is also a must!
Avoiding links from low-quality sites
Check your outbound links to make sure you are away from low-quality sites. Even though you can get paid with link exchanges, linking to a toxic website has the potential to ruin your site’s authority and ranking in the long run.
Distribute link anchors in the right proportions and not overoptimize
Although the safe answer is: “It depends,” some recommendations exist. According to at least a few anchor text case studies, the golden formula is:
- 50% – Brand anchor texts
- 15% – Vossite.fr
- 10-20% – Bare URL
- 10-15% – Page Title / Blog Post Title
- 1-5% – Generic anchor texts
- 1-5% – Exact and partial match keywords
But, once again, make sure you carefully analyze your niche and your competitors.
Keep link anchors relevant to the content
Over time, Google will only improve its algorithms responsible for understanding the real meaning of a page’s content. Since 2015, he has been testing DeepMind, a natural language processing technology that allows artificial intelligence to learn just like humans.
It will have no problem determining whether a specific anchor text or link is relevant to the content of a web page.
If you place an internal link with irrelevant anchor text on your own website, it may hurt your search rankings. This is true for backlinks with irrelevant anchor texts.
Google is obsessed with improving user experience. It does its best to provide relevant content in the most useful way possible. Obviously anchors that are irrelevant to links that lead users to equally irrelevant content will be penalized.
Focus on deep page link anchors
One of the most common mistakes beginner SEOs make is focusing on anchors that direct to high-level pages, primarily by placing links to a home page, or even concrete product pages.
An anchor strategy that is purely built around these shallow pages doesn’t look natural to Google and other search engines, simply because people don’t naturally place links that way. Typically, they link to share-worthy content like blog posts.
What you should do is focus your anchors on relevant and deep pages. Not only will you create natural anchors, but you will also allow visitors to navigate to higher level pages.
Place link anchors where the user is most attentive
As users often do not read pages entirely, but skim over them, the first paragraphs of a page, its titles, subtitles and images become important points, people pay more attention to them. It is therefore a good idea to place your anchor texts next to these “hot” parts of a page in order to increase click-through and engagement rates.
If users find the anchor text descriptive and potentially useful, they will click the link to view the content.
Conclusion
Anchor text optimization practices evolve over time. As most of them are adjusted according to Penguin updates, be careful to keep your anchors natural and relevantwhich is the first point of interest for Google.
If your anchor texts are up to par, do a complete audit of inbound links to sort and disavow those coming from unreliable and irrelevant websites.
To finish, don’t try to fool the system, this will not work in the long term. Rather, make sure your anchor is natural (avoid over-optimization, use anchors in the right proportions, don’t link to low-quality websites), and use links rich in time keywords. elsewhere to help you better reference yourself.
Don’t hesitate to consult your anchors using Search Console.