{"id":1559,"date":"2017-10-26T06:54:42","date_gmt":"2017-10-26T06:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.socialpatterns.com\/?p=1559"},"modified":"2017-10-26T06:54:42","modified_gmt":"2017-10-26T06:54:42","slug":"anchor-text-important-backlinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/contentcreationv4.local\/anchor-text-important-backlinks\/","title":{"rendered":"Anchor Text Best Practices for Backlinks (Using Branded, Exact Match, Generic, Etc)"},"content":{"rendered":"

When talking about anchor text, we are concerned about two areas of SEO – Anchor Text for Internal linking<\/a> and Anchor Text for Backlinks. Both can get you into trouble if you over optimize. But, using anchor text wisely can give your SEO campaigns much-needed power in relevancy.<\/p>\n

That’s the key word here – to use your anchor text wisely<\/em>.<\/p>\n

How important is anchor text for Backlinks?<\/h2>\n

Anchor text is very important when it comes to your backlinks. It can add relevancy to your pages by using keywords and keyword phrases and variations.<\/p>\n

In fact, early on, Google had a pretty heavy reliance on anchor text, as shown in Google’s 2008 paper called \u201cThe Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

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2.2 Anchor Text<\/h3>\n

The text of links is treated in a special way in our search engine. Most search engines associate the text of a link with the page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the page the link points to. This has several advantages. First, anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves. Second, anchors may exist for documents which cannot be indexed by a text-based search engine, such as images, programs, and databases. This makes it possible to return web pages which have not actually been crawled. Note that pages that have not been crawled can cause problems, since they are never checked for validity before being returned to the user. In this case, the search engine can even return a page that never actually existed, but had hyperlinks pointing to it. However, it is possible to sort the results, so that this particular problem rarely happens.<\/p>\n

This idea of propagating anchor text to the page it refers to was implemented in the World Wide Web Worm [McBryan 94<\/a>] especially because it helps search non-text information, and expands the search coverage with fewer downloaded documents. We use anchor propagation mostly because anchor text can help provide better quality results. Using anchor text efficiently is technically difficult because of the large amounts of data which must be processed. In our current crawl of 24 million pages, we had over 259 million anchors which we indexed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But anchor text for backlinks in 2017 and beyond is more important in the sense of sculpting your anchor text distribution to appear more natural.<\/p>\n

This is what I was talking about using your anchor text wisely. You can definitely throw some keywords in there, but you mostly want to keep it looking natural. You don’t want any red flags to appear to Google to tell them “Hey I’m building links over here, and by the way, I am manually adding these links”<\/p>\n

If you have a completely natural link profile such as links earned from outreach and editorial links (i.e. links you don’t control), then you don’t need to worry about anchor text at all. Google will be able to tell that the anchor text and your link profile is completely natural.<\/p>\n

However, if you are actively building links alongside the naturally earned links, you want to make sure all your anchor text distribution looks natural.<\/p>\n

What is a backlink profile?<\/h2>\n

When analyzing a backlink profile<\/a>, you would typically consider many aspects to gauge the overall health of your link profile. Here are a few of the things an SEO may look at analyzing their link profile:<\/p>\n