Internal Anchor Text - Partial or Exact Match Does It Matter?
-
When linking internally on an ecommerce site between pages and from a sitemap, is partial or exact match on the anchor text a significant factor?
If it matters to Google, which is a better practice to use? I found plenty of info on external links, but precious little on internal links (which suggests it doesn't matter enough to worry about).
-
I agree with EGOL and would add my belief that you should use any text you feel is most beneficial when using internal linking. Generally it will be exact match. I would make no effort to vary the text unless it was helpful for users.
Why? The entire concept of varying anchor text is based on Google knowing that links which are earned naturally are not under your control and therefore the anchor text will vary. Since all the links on your site are 100% under your control, the rules for external links should not apply. Let me clarify this is my logical thinking on the subject and I have no evidence to support this statement, but I do follow it myself.
-
I must say that I have spent very little time thinking about this. I have ecommerce sites and have not spent even one hour trying to get keyword anchor text into them from external sites in the past ten years.
Instead we create content that a few people link to and the links to that content are what power the sites. Nearly all of those links are followed and nearly all of those links have a domain, a URL, or a brand as the anchor text.
I have read what others say on this topic and people who I trust say that anchor text should be varied across a broad mix of keywords - and that would mean very few exact matches and a lot of partial matches.
-
I may have overlooked something - but wasn't the experiment referring to external anchor text?
-
Hi Erica. I checked that out as well as Cyrus' video. I'm curious if exact match for internal and partial match for external is best practice for an ecommerce site.
-
Check out this post: Which Type of Link Anchor Text is the Most Effective? [An Experiment]
-
Thanks EGOL. Your thoughts on partial match for external links to ecommerce sites?
-
I am very confident that anchor text on internal links passes value to the target page. It also can add optimization on the host page.
However, on an ecommerce site I would select internal anchor text that strongly and quickly communicates the destination content to the visitor.
Slap their face with your words.... "Green Widgets"
If you select anchor text that communicates the content of the target page to your visitor as strongly as a slap on the face then you have at the same time selected anchor text that will help you in the SERPs.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Least Text for Home Page
We are rebranding our web site and intend to create more visual pages with less text on the assumption that no one want to read anymore. What is the least amount of text that we can include in a home page without damaging out ability to rank on Google? Google recently increased the permitted amount of text on description tags. Can we shift text to the description tax and place more on ALT tags that are not immediately visible to visitors. Any thoughts, comments, advice?? I am adding image of the old home page and new home page (text to be written, 3 columns of dummy text) so the change in the amount of text is visible. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan GkvnNR8 UH9ptbh0 -
More internal links pointing to internal page vs homepage
I was looking at our GSC internal links section and I saw that we have 901 internal links going to our compare rates form and 890 going to our homepage. At the end of most of our content I add a call to action to our compare rates form. Is this SEO friendly or should I have more pointing to the homepage and less pointing to our compare rates page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
How best to handle partial domain move?
The scenario is this, we have a website eg: ABC.com where the content is in two language folders (en-us and en-gb). We have created a new brand with website XYZ.com for the USA market. Of course, this domain will take a while to rank because it is completely fresh. My question is how best to deactivate the en-us content on the old site to: a) prevent it showing up on Google US
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esseljay
and
b) pass the US traffic to the new website to boost its rankings I was thinking of removing the en-us pages from ABC.com and using a 410 error page containing a link to XYZ.com
Would it be better to replace the content on en-us instead (with a link)? I'm not keen to use a straight 301 redirect as sometimes we get traffic from other countries to the en-us content. Thanks in advance Mozzers 🙂0 -
Internal Linking from Menu or body text or both with exact match keyword?
I used to have my menu link to every page with my exact match keywords. I am a Magician and have pages for each county / town so I had a link to /magician-hampshire with the anchor text Magician Hampshire in the menu. I recently had my website updated and the developer told me this was very spammy have a menu that said Magician Hampshire, Magician Surrey, Magician Berkshire He suggested that I should now have a menu structure that says Areas Covered>Hampshire - Surrey - Berkshire etc.Google will know my website is about a magician and relate the two together. Is this correct or should I revert my menu back to anchor text of Magician (County) I am running wordpress and he said the title attribute can say Magician Hampshire but the Visible text is for the user and not Google. I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text. When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu) Questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rnperki
Should I link to every main page from the Menu with the exact anchor text?
Does google only take into account the first link to a page it discovers?
Will it associate a link to a page with just the text of the county (Berkshire) to be related to Magicians in Berkshire as that is what the page is about? A few years ago I used to have at the bottom of each page Magician Hampshire | Magician Surrey | Magician Berkshire | Magician Sussex links - and to date a a lot of other Magicians employ this same technique. I was told google would slap them for it but so far it has not and it seems to be working for them. Many Thanks Roger http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk0 -
Duplicate content across internation urls
We have a large site with 1,000+ pages of content to launch in the UK. Much of this content is already being used on a .nz url which is going to stay. Do you see this as an issue or do you thin Google will take localised factoring into consideration. We could add a link from the NZ pages to the UK. We cant noindex the pages as this is not an option. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide0 -
Do I have to tell WBT site moved to a subdirectory on another internal site?
I am moving content from one site to another and redirecting the DNS from www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com/old-site. I have put the 301 in place but I wanted to make sure I have to also tell Webmaster Tools to change the old site to the new domain? We still want the old domain name to answer and redirect to www.newsite.com/old-site. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
Internal Site Structure Question (URL Formation and Internal Link Design)
Hi, I have an e-commerce website that has an articles section: There is an articles.aspx file that can be reached from the top menu and it holds links to all of the articles as follows: xxx.com/articles/article1.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
xxx.com/articles/article2.aspx I want to add several new articles under a new sections, for example a complete set of articles under the title of "buying guide" and the question is what would be the best way? I was thinking of adding a "computers-buying-guides.aspx" accessible from the top menu / footer and from it linking to: xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/what-to-check-prior-to-buying-a-laptop.aspx
xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/weight-vs-performance.aspx
etc. Any thoughts / recommendations? Thanks0 -
URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important
Basically my question is as follows, what's better: www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs). or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain). In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same. To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure? Please advise, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0