Varying the backlink anchor text

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Varying the backlink anchor text

olly

11:32 pm on Jun 23, 2010 (gmt 0)

I have repeatedly heard that it is important to vary the anchor text of incoming links to a page.

What I want to know is this - what is the best policy to do this in a manner which will not raise any flags?

One thing I have considered is to ask the linking site to use whatever keywords they think are best. This would introduce a "natural" variance to the anchor text used. The other option is to use the actual URL of our page in the anchor text - this URL normally contains the targeted keywords anyway.

What will happen if, collectively, incoming links have anchor text that is "too similar". Moreover, what does "too similar" entail exactly?

Does anybody have any feedback on this?

tedster

8:12 am on Jun 24, 2010 (gmt 0)

If the only backlinks you have are the ones that you arrange, then there's nobody linking to you naturally. That's not a happy situation, and I would look to fix that, whatever it takes.

The whole point of measuring natural variation is that it IS natural - meaning you can't imitate it very well. So I would probably go with the plan you mentioned - let other sites link however they choose.

Maybe check your competitors' anchor text and see what natural variation looks like in your particular market - because I'm pretty sure that Google does their statistical analysis of what's natural by individual market taxonomy, rather than calculating one statistic for the entire web.