After the release of Penguin update by Google, sometime back SEOTacklebox did a webinar about keywords, linking and search ranking. Later they revisited that data after allowing plenty of time to gather more information and came to some conclusions about the best distribution of anchor text for ranking in Google.
It is well known by now that Google does not want people gaming their search algorithm. But still their search results are a product of computer generated algorithm. No person is sitting there to decide, which websites rank and which sites don't, for all search phrases. Due to this basic fact, there will always be ways to improve your search rankings by associating your site with what Google is looking for.
Link building for better search rankings is still necessary. Links are still the primary way, due to which Google decides what sites to rank where. The difference after Penguin update is that now the links need to be distributed in a natural manner rather than a keyword based manner. SEOMOZ published an article sometime ago, about the research on 10 national brand websites, that rank very well in the search engines. They broke down the percentages of links by anchor text. They came up with is a good formula for link building strategy.
Results found shown that about 65% of the links were exact match, phrase matching or brand matching with regards to the anchor text. The breakdown between these three categories was 18% exact match, 17% phrase match and 30% brand match. Remaining 35% back-links were evenly divided between the URL as the anchor text and other unrelated anchor text.
It presents a great scheme to design your own link building strategy. Using the ratios above, here is what a sample link building strategy might look like for a site, called "Widget World" selling "Red Widgets". For every 100 links built, the following should be done:
This is a simplistic breakdown, but the data backs up these general ratios as being the target. Regardless of whether the back links are built all naturally or built by you or outsourced, if you keep to this ratio you will not be degraded by Google, and you will see your search rankings increase.
When building these links, you can consider building higher page rank or PR links for the first line item – the exact match phrase. This will hopefully transfer a little more link juice through that phrase. When you combine that with the varied anchor text, adhering to these ratios, you have a winning formula for better search rankings.
Source(s):
http://seotacklebox.com/blog/proper-anchor-text-distribution-for-better-rankings/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization
It is well known by now that Google does not want people gaming their search algorithm. But still their search results are a product of computer generated algorithm. No person is sitting there to decide, which websites rank and which sites don't, for all search phrases. Due to this basic fact, there will always be ways to improve your search rankings by associating your site with what Google is looking for.
Link building for better search rankings is still necessary. Links are still the primary way, due to which Google decides what sites to rank where. The difference after Penguin update is that now the links need to be distributed in a natural manner rather than a keyword based manner. SEOMOZ published an article sometime ago, about the research on 10 national brand websites, that rank very well in the search engines. They broke down the percentages of links by anchor text. They came up with is a good formula for link building strategy.
Results found shown that about 65% of the links were exact match, phrase matching or brand matching with regards to the anchor text. The breakdown between these three categories was 18% exact match, 17% phrase match and 30% brand match. Remaining 35% back-links were evenly divided between the URL as the anchor text and other unrelated anchor text.
It presents a great scheme to design your own link building strategy. Using the ratios above, here is what a sample link building strategy might look like for a site, called "Widget World" selling "Red Widgets". For every 100 links built, the following should be done:
- 18 links with anchor text of "Red Widgets" – this is the Exact match
- 17 links with anchor text containing Red Widgets, such as "Handy Red Widgets", "Waterproof Red Widgets" etc – this is the Phrase match
- 30 links with anchor text of "Widget World" or slight variation – this is the Brand
- 18 links with the anchor text of "yoursitename.com" – this is the URL
- 17 links with random anchor text – this could be long tail phrases like "see more about Red Widgets at our site" or simple phrases like "click here"
This is a simplistic breakdown, but the data backs up these general ratios as being the target. Regardless of whether the back links are built all naturally or built by you or outsourced, if you keep to this ratio you will not be degraded by Google, and you will see your search rankings increase.
When building these links, you can consider building higher page rank or PR links for the first line item – the exact match phrase. This will hopefully transfer a little more link juice through that phrase. When you combine that with the varied anchor text, adhering to these ratios, you have a winning formula for better search rankings.
Source(s):
http://seotacklebox.com/blog/proper-anchor-text-distribution-for-better-rankings/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization
