Penguin Algorithm Update

By Jason Hawkins on March 5, 2013
  • The secret of Business

Anchor text diversity – What it is and why it matters.

Anchor text diversity is something that became really important in 2012 for people who had websites that were trying to market online through organic searches. For those of you who don’t know what an anchor text is I will explain it to you. An anchor is basically the clickable text that is used to link from one site to another. It is the word or phrase that is used to link to sites or pages together. Back in early 2012 and before that SEO’s would overuse anchor text and it really helped getting your website to show up high in the search results depending on which keywords you used as anchor texts. Google found out about this tactic and they updated their algorithm to detect this sort of manipulative technique. Now a days, if you overuse keywords with your anchor texts you actually are hurting yourself, because you will not show up high in the rankings for that keywords. And its really obvious as to why Google did this, they have a job to do and that is to provide a relevant result and reliable result. These websites that use to rank really well because of their overused keyword anchor texts were not always the most relevant and most reliable. Google was trying to provide a better user experience when they updated the algorithm to detect this sort of work. It is clearly not a natural technique, it is something that only a SEO would do to manipulate the search engines algorithm. Now there is a lot of speculation as to where the fine line lays when it comes to over using and naturally using keywords as your anchor text.

The difference really is not defined exactly, but what I can tell you is that less is definitely more. The less you use your keywords as anchor texts the more of chance you have at ranking well for those keywords. As long as you have really clean on page and high quality links associated with unique and well written content that is keyword friendly, then you have a really good chance at ranking.

If you are familiar with using backlink profile tools like ahrefs or majesticseo.com then you can check to see for yourself. If you Google search the term “document assembly” you will see that xpressdox is ranking at the top just under wikipedia, the back link report for that website shows that document assembly was barely used. and they show up really well for it. Another site that is in the 9th position which is business-intergrity.com is having trouble showing up. I know they are targeting this keywords because it is the second most commonly used keyword in the anchor text report from ahrefs.com. They had a bunch of really poor links pointing to their site using “document assembly” as the keyword, and thus they are not ranking well at all for it. They other interesting point is that business-integrity.com had well over 4 times the amount of back links than that of the well ranking xpressdox.com. The links pointing to business integrity were very low quality. This is a poor example what SEO companies provide as a service. There are so many companies that do this kind of work that use to work in the days where Google did not catch this sort of work. Now a days, you are better off just calling Google and telling them to penalize you.

There are some really good articles and videos from people like Matt Cutts himself that explain what the Google Penguin update consisted of for those of you who want here it from a industry god. Anchor text diversification is something that everyone should be practicing in 2012 and 2013 in order to try and get back on top of the search results. To hear more about this like this you can visit Matt Cutts’ very own Blog.

Matt Cutt’s Blog

Another thing that Google started to consider after the penguin update was the quality and relevance of the referring domains that were pointing to your site. The archaic ways of link building focused merely on the quantity of links, so naturally SEO’s created ways to obtain a large number of back links as quickly as possible and that is how you could get away with ranking well on Google. Now you will also suffer is you use those sorts of techniques. There were many software applications created that would scrape the web and find open areas to leave links with keywords and content that was pre-loaded into the program. These programs would create profiles, verify activation emails, spin content and use keyword rich anchor text links back to many page of your site. If you suspect this kind of activity from your SEO company or team then you could be in some serious trouble. Give us a call or email us for a free back link audit and we would be more than happy to give you some good advice on what to do.

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings
Matt Cutts



About The Author

Jason Hawkins
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com

Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.