Summary
I have learned that Google uses many ranking factors, but anchor text can cause significant penalties if not optimized properly. It's important to be mindful of how you use anchor text to improve SEO results.
Anchor text is the clickable text in a link, and it exists in various forms, including branded, generic, naked link, and exact match among others. Understanding these types can help improve site relevance and authority.
Using exact match anchor text used to be powerful but is now risky and less effective. Google can now understand page relevance through text around the links, making aggressive use of exact match text unnecessary.
A good link-building strategy is to use underoptimized anchor texts on high-authority websites. This approach minimizes risk and maximizes link value.
Websites with a high percentage of keyword-rich anchor text in their profile can risk penalties. Focus instead on having a higher proportion of branded or naked link anchor text to maintain a safe profile.
Don't copy competitors' anchor text strategies if your site lacks authority. High-authority sites can use more keyword-rich anchors because they have a solid base of unoptimized links as well.
I developed a strategy called "anchor text cycling" to build a natural profile. Start with an exact match anchor text followed by varied and unoptimized texts. Monitor progress and adjust as necessary, opting for exact match anchors only as a last resort.
Tracking your anchor text is crucial to prevent over-optimization. Use a template to monitor and maintain a diverse anchor profile with heavy emphasis on branded anchors.
A natural anchor text profile, which avoids patterns and excessive keyword-rich text, is more effective and can lead to better rankings with fewer links.
Before focusing on anchor text optimization, ensure your website's on-site SEO, content quality, and backlink quality are up to par. These foundational elements are key to achieving competitive advantage.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest starting with the basics to enhance your website's SEO. First, focus on using a variety of anchor texts. Mix in branded, naked link, and generic anchor texts more frequently to create a balanced profile. Try to avoid using too much keyword-rich anchor text to prevent penalties.
A good way of doing this is by practicing "anchor text cycling." Begin by using an exact match anchor text sparingly, then switch to varied types like branded, generic, or keyword variations. Only use exact match anchors when absolutely necessary.
It's also crucial to track and monitor your anchor text. You can make a simple template for this. Record each link's type to check if you're maintaining diversity. Remember, consistency is key to stay clear of penalties.
Try not to copy competitors if your site lacks authority. They might get away with risky strategies due to the high number of unoptimized links. Stick to what works well for your site's current trust level.
Before diving deep into anchor text strategies, ensure your website’s content and on-site SEO are strong. Focus on crafting high-quality content and securing trustworthy backlinks, as these are foundational elements for good SEO performance.
Using these strategies, you can improve your website's search engine optimization without spending too much time or money, giving you more visibility and possibly more business or personal growth opportunities.
Quotes by Author
#### "Anchor text is the visible and clickable text in a link"
#### "Google uses the text around your link, also known as annotation text, to assign its topical relevance"
#### "The best link building strategy is getting links on trusted, high authoritative websites using underoptimized anchor texts"
#### "Sites get penalized for their link profiles as a whole, not just one or two links"
#### "The key is to be random and to avoid patterns"
Full Transcript
Google uses thousands of ranking factors, but there's one that causes more penalties than any other. Today, I'm going to show you how to optimize your anchor text to avoid penalties and to drive killer SEO results like this. So, let's just get right into it. So, anchor text is the visible and clickable text in a link. And here's how it looks in HTML. The phrase anchor text applies to all hyperlinks, including internal and external links. Today we're focusing on external anchor texts from backlinks or links from other websites to yours. And there are eight different types of anchor texts. First are branded anchors like gotch SEO Academy, Rankability or Nathan Gotch. Next are generic anchors like go here, click here or this website. Third are naked link anchors like got seo.com. Fourth are image anchors which come from the alt text within an image. Next are brand plus keyword anchors like rankability SEO affiliate program. And then you have keyword variations which are perfect for diversifying your anchor text profile. They can also help drive more topical relevance to your page. So if my keyword is St. Louis SEO consultant, then some variations would be SEO company in St. Louis or STL SEO consultant. And finally, there is exact match anchor text, which is the most powerful but also the most dangerous type of anchor text. So if your keyword is SEO tools, your exact match anchor text is SEO tools. And back in the day, you could slam any page with exact match anchor text and it would work. But now that's not only dangerous, but it's actually ineffective. Also, the risk versus reward ratio is completely unbalanced. Now, the main reason is because Google doesn't really need exact match anchor text to understand pages anymore. In 2019, Google filed a patent about anchor tag indexing in a web crawler system. And don't worry, I'm not going to bore you to death with this topic. Once you get past all the technical language, there's one big idea in this patent. Google uses the text around your link, also known as annotation text, to assign its topical relevance. In other words, place your links in relevant content and place your primary keyword close to your link. So, here are some examples for the target keyword anchor text with the link placement in red. Now, the good news is that highquality link building companies like digital.pr extremely careful with what anchor text they use. Plus, they're only getting you the most powerful backlinks on highly trusted websites. In general, the best link building strategy is getting links on trusted, high authoritative websites using underoptimized anchor texts. So, I'll have a link below where you can learn more about digital.pr. Now, the question is, what anchor text should you use? Well, there's a common trend among the hundreds of penalized websites I've audited over the last decade. They almost always have aggressive anchor text percentages. In fact, it's the first place I look when someone needs help with a penalized website. So, here's how to analyze your anchor text distribution. So, all you need to do is just go into Semrush and go ahead and enter a domain where you want to look at the actual anchor text profile. And right now, I'm going be looking at the domain as a whole. So, this is the entire domain. This is usually a pretty good place to start to just kind of see where you're at. But, we'll go ahead and click on anchors. And what we want to see here is that the large majority of our anchor text across the entire website is branded anchor text or naked link. Okay, so you can see here, you know, rankability in this case, high percentage of backlinks are just using our branded anchor text. And so this is really important. You can run this across any site that has and we have obviously this is a brand new site that we're working on. But if you go and look at any site, if we did even let's just do Semrush for example for fun, and you'll see they've got, you know, over 2 million back links specifically just for their brand name. Okay, so this is what a good anchor text profile will look like. And this is a safe anchor text profile. You'll notice there's not a lot of keyword-rich anchor text that's showing up here. It's all super branded. So this is exactly what you should aim for on a sitewide basis. But we can go a step further and we'll go and look at some of their pages where they're getting a lot more traffic. Okay, so let's go to one that has a little more traffic here, like bounce rate, right? We'll click on this one and then we'll see what their anchor text profile looks and just change it to exact match URL. So that way you can see the actual URLs anchor text. But we can see here, you can see it's starting to change a little bit. So now it's got, you know, bounce rate is actually appearing in the top anchor and we're seeing percentages. This is a nice way to diversify. And we've got the exact match in here. So, exact match anchor text here is the number three most used anchor text here. So, once again, I you know, explaining earlier in this video that if this was what your entire anchor text profile looked like, this would look really dangerous. But you have to remember we're looking on a sitewide basis in general. and a site that has a lot of branded anchor text across the whole site, we're talking, you know, millions of links in this case, they can get away with more. But if you have a brand new website and you were this aggressive with keyword-rich anchor text, you'd be playing a very dangerous game. And just to kind of top it off, even their fifth mostused anchor text is still branded. Okay? So, just keep in mind, don't model these super authoritative websites because they are not going to be treated the same way as a site that has lower authority and less trust. So, you're much better just to be much more careful with using that keyword rich anchor text. And I would say for most normal websites that are not super authoritative, focus more on branded anchor text and just slip in some of those exact match anchor text or partial match anchors when you feel like you really need to give that page a lift. Now, before I go any further, I need to cover an important question. Should you copy your competitor's anchor text? So, while I generally agree with the philosophy, there are two big issues. Number one, modeling the anchor text percentages of authoritative websites is risky. So, authoritative websites have built a lot of trust. Therefore, it's more acceptable for them to have high percentages of keyword-rich anchors. So, if you copy them, you'll likely get wrecked if you have a brand new website. Now, why is that? Well, it's because your website doesn't have the authority and trust to do so. Number two, it doesn't take into account sitewide anchor text percentages. So, how does some websites get away with aggressive exact match anchor text? It's because they have the authority and trust to do so and they have a high percentage of unoptimized anchor text in their sitewide profile. And that's why you can't model them on a pageby-page basis. You have to model their entire anchor text profile. So, let's look at mozz.com for example. If you examine their sitewide anchor text, you'll see that most of it is branded or generic. And this gives them the leeway they need to be more aggressive on the page level. So, here's the anchor text for their anchor text page. Now, you could argue that this is aggressive, but it's acceptable because they have authority, trust, and unoptimized anchor text across the site as a whole. And it's true. 59% is huge on its own, but it's small relative to their entire site. So the big takeaway is you shouldn't model your competitor's anchor text if you don't have authority, trust, and unoptimized anchor texts across your entire site. So then what should you do? Well, follow these percentages and you'll never need to worry about penalties and you'll still get awesome results. And now let me introduce you to a strategy I developed for building a natural anchor text profile. It's called anchor text cycling and it works like this. Step one, hit your target page with an exact match anchor text. Now, you might be wondering, isn't it dangerous to hit a brand new website with an exact match anchor text? Well, the truth is it isn't. And sites get penalized for their link profiles as a whole, not just one or two links. It's kind of like saying eating McDonald's one time is the reason why someone is overweight. We know that it's the combined effect of a bad diet over a period of time that leads to obesity. And the same goes for your link profile. So now that I got that weird analogy out of the way, why do I use an exact match anchor text for my first backlink? Well, A, I want to see how the page reacts. And B, I want to establish what my site or target page is right away. And now the next step is to step number two, hit your site with unoptimized anchor text variations. So use branded, naked link, generic, and keyword variations at this stage. And now step three is track your rankings and watch the progress. You can get a decent read on your performance within 1 to 3 months. And if your page isn't moving, then you need to reassess. And the answer is rarely to use more exact match anchor text. In fact, it should be a last resort once you've exhausted all of your options. And I recommend completing a full ranking diagnosis to identify all potential factors that are stopping your page from ranking number one. But if you pass every single checkpoint, then it's okay to move on to step number four, which is hit your site with another exact match anchor text if necessary. Then just repeat this anchor text cycling process over and over until you rank. So the entire point of using this is to build a diverse and natural anchor text profile. Now, do you want to know the secret to a natural anchor text profile? Well, the key is to be random and to avoid patterns. Take a look at these two examples. Site number one is the typical link profile you'll see when someone is spamming anchor text. And Google's algorithms can easily conclude that this site is building artificial links. A manual reviewer wouldn't even be necessary in this case. Site number two has a natural and diverse anchor text profile. It will outrank site number one with fewer backlinks and less keyword-rich anchor text. So now the key to making all of this work is to track your anchor text. Here's how to do it. So one of the most important things to do is track your anchor text. So this is a template that I use for all my SEO campaigns. It's available inside of Gotcha SEO Academy. So now the way this works is very simple. We've got basically our outreach process here and all the things that we're doing. And the most important part is this column here in the context what we're talking about here is the anchor text column. And you can see I'm actually tracking the anchor text of our placements. And it doesn't matter whether this link was acquired through us doing outreach or the link was acquired naturally. I still want to be tracking this because I just want to make sure that we're not being overly aggressive with this anchor text. And as you can tell, going back to what I mentioned earlier, high high percentage of very branded anchor text. So branded anchor text, a lot of naked link anchor text and just things that are not super o over optimized. So in general, that is going to be your safest bet is just to keep it pretty branded. And like I mentioned before, just really drip in those keyword rich anchor text. Now, keep in mind when you're going to do that, make sure when you use an exact match anchor text, always drive it from a really good link source. So, use a really like high authority website to get that exact match anchor text because you want to get the most bang for your buck. So, to conclude, anchor text is one very small piece of the SEO puzzle, and most websites are littered with on-site SEO, SEO content, and backlink quality issues. These areas need to be tackled first. And once you've optimized those, well, then dive into Anchor text optimization because it can give you the edge you need to dominate your competitors.
