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
-
Benefit of internal link in content
Hi, Is there a real benefit to having internal links in content other than at the bottom of a page for example and not surrounded by content. Would the benefit be 1 to 10 or 1 to 1.5 ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Should we optimise our internal links?
Hi again, We recently had a technical search audit done by a specialist agency and they discovered a number of internal links that caused redirects to happen. The agency has recommended we update all of these links to link directly to the destination so we don't lose out on link equity. We'd just like to know if you think this would be a worthwhile use of our time. Our web team seem to think that returning a 301 to a crawler means that the crawler will stop indexing the original URL and instead index the redirected destination? Thanks all. Clair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iescape2 -
International Href Lang Tag Parameter Issue
Hey, let's say I'm on the following page.. site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=womens I view the page source and it looks like this.. My question is, should I remove the parameter for the hreflang tag???? I just need some clarification that NO parameter page should have a canonical tag and / or href lang with parameters..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Backlinks to internal pages
Hi, Our website of 3K+ pages currently has more links coming to internal pages (2nd & 3rd Level), compared to links to homepage. Just wanted to know if this is bad for rankings ? Please share your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Umesh-Chandra0 -
Using rel="nofollow" when link has an exact match anchor but the link does add value for the user
Hi all, I am wondering what peoples thoughts are on using rel="nofollow" for a link on a page like this http://askgramps.org/9203/a-bushel-of-wheat-great-value-than-bushel-of-goldThe anchor text is "Brigham Young" and the page it's pointing to's title is Brigham Young and it goes into more detail on who he is. So it is exact match. And as we know if this page has too much exact match anchor text it is likely to be considered "over-optimized". I guess one of my questions is how much is too much exact match or partial match anchor text? I have heard ratios tossed around like for every 10 links; 7 of them should not be targeted at all while 3 out of the 10 would be okay. I know it's all about being natural and creating value but using exact match or partial match anchors can definitely create value as they are almost always highly relevant. One reason that prompted my question is I have heard that this is something Penguin 3.0 is really going look at.On the example URL I gave I want to keep that particular link as is because I think it does add value to the user experience but then I used rel="nofollow" so it doesn't pass PageRank. Anyone see a problem with doing this and/or have a different idea? An important detail is that both sites are owned by the same organization. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Heavy Internal Linking Help
One of the sites I work on is a home improvement ecommerce website that does fairly well for its niche. One of the biggest problems that we're not sure how to adequately handle is a heavy internal linking issue. The homepage (http://www.fauxpanels.com/) has approx. 226 internal links which is mainly due to the navigation structure. There are far worse pages though (the Samples page http://www.fauxpanels.com/samples.php has over 800 internal links). For the most part, management doesn't want any massive changes to the navigation layout. The Top navigation bar has a number of dropdown menus when you hover, the Left Navigation Bar expands to show more choices, and the Bottom navigation bar in many instances is just repeats of links that can be found elsewhere. Also, the product links in the body of the page can be found linked in the Left Navigation. This is not what I would personally consider the best way to handle navigation but the Customer Service Department has gotten numerous calls and emails over the years about how much people love our navigation and how easy it is to find things. My thought was trying to lessen the amount of links by having things grouped more often into Category pages/hub pages where applicable so we can remove some of the links. We've also considered NoFollowing links but my understanding is that even if you NoFollow the link equity is still divided by the number of on-page links. So, any of you much more experienced SEOs have any idea how I can lessen the heavy internal linking without completely re-doing the site's navigation layout and not harming link equity, ranking, etc.? Or, conversely, would you consider having an average 200-300 internal links per page not to be a real issue given the positive effect it has apparently had on user experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeRoberts0 -
International URL Puzzle
Hello, I have 4 different URL's going to 4 different countries that all contain the same content and Google is seeing them as duplicate pages. For ecommerce reasons I have to have these 4 pages separated. Here is a example of the pages below so you can see the URL structure: www.example/com/canada www.example.com/australia www.example.com/usa www.example.com/UK How do I fix this duplicate content problem? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalops0 -
SEOMoz Internal Dupe. Content & Possible Coding Issues
SEOmoz Community! I have a relatively complicated SEO issue that has me pretty stumped... First and foremost, I'd appreciate any suggestions that you all may have. I'll be the first to admit that I am not an SEO expert (though I am trying to be). Most of my expertise is with PPC. But that's beside the point. Now, the issues I am having: I have two sites: http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx A lot of our SEO efforts thus-far have done good for Federal Auto Loan... and we are seeing positive impacts from them. However, we recently did a server transfer (may or may not be related)... and since that time a significant number of INTERNAL duplicate content pages have appeared through the SEOmoz crawler. The number is around 20+ for both Federal Auto Loan and Federal Mortgage Services (see attachments). I've tried to include as much as I can via the attachments. What you will see is all of the content pages (articles) with dupe. content issues along with a screen capture of the articles being listed as duplicate for the pages: Car Financing How It Works A Home Loan is Possible with Bad Credit (Please let me know if you could use more examples) At first I assumed it was simply an issue with SEOmoz... however, I am now worried it is impacting my sites (I wasn't originally because Federal Auto Loan has great quality scores and is climbing in organic presence daily). That being said, we recently launched Federal Mortgage Services for PPC... and my quality scores are relatively poor. In fact, we are not even ranking (scratch that, not even showing that we have content) for "mortgage refinance" even though we have content (unique, good, and original content) specifically around "mortgage refinance" keywords. All things considered, Federal Mortgage Services should be tighter in the SEO department than Federal Auto Loan... but it is clearly not! I could really use some significant help here... Both of our sites have a number of access points: http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx are both the designated home pages. And I have rel=canonical tags stating such. However, my sites can also be reached via the following: http://www.federalautoloan.com http://www.federalautoloan.com/default.aspx http://www.federalmortgageservices.com http://www.federalmortgageservics.com/default.aspx Should I incorporate code that "redirects" traffic as well? Or is it fine with just the relevancy tags? I apologize for such a long post, but I wanted to include as much as possible up-front. If you have any further questions... I'll be happy to include more details. Thank you all in advance for the help! I greatly appreciate it! F7dWJ.png dN9Xk.png dN9Xk.png G62JC.png ABL7x.png 7yG92.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WPColt0