Link Anchor Text - Best Practice?
-
Moz - Open Site Explorer using the following setup:
Tab: Inbound Links
Show: "all"
from: "Only Internal"I have run a number of random tests and have noticed the following results in the link anchor text.
[No Anchor Text]
company name
website url
Home
etc.What is the best practice and naming convention to be used?
Regards Mark
-
Hi Mark,
Is the link part of a navigation menu? If so I don't see any problem with leaving it as 'Home'. If you're linking within the body of a page (for instance in a blogpost), something like 'visit the homepage' or just a branded term should be fine.
-
Thank you for your quick and detailed response.
Apologies, I think I have not explained my question well...See link: http://imgur.com/iDy0E1Z
As you can see, every url has the same link anchor text named 'Home'.
My question is:
What is the best naming convention for this link anchor text. Should i simply leave it blank, call it 'Home', my website url, etc.Regards Mark
-
Hi Mark,
When it comes to link building (internal or external) there are few thumb rules -
- The link should look natural
- The link should point to a useful resource
Lets take the example of internal links -
If say i own a digital marketing agency, and i want the home page to rank for the keyword "digital marketing". Old school SEO would suggest that I use "digital marketing" as one of the anchor texts and create links from inner pages to the home page. Trust me two years ago that tactic worked. But now lets evaluate from a users perspective, a user is say reading a blog that talks about Facebook as a marketing tool and sees the anchor text "digital marketing".With the reading flow, the user would probably expect a post that gives more insight into digital marketing but alas he is taken to the home page. You getting the drift? Same logic is used by search engines, on the website the links should be used to indicate hierarchy and more importantly help the users. Occasional use of keywords in the anchor text is fine.
Now lets look at external links -
With the advent of Penguin update that focuses on over optimization (both on page and off page), having keyword rich anchor texts (example - car loans) to point to your website from third party websites is not at all recommended. Also having links from general directories, general blogs etc is not considered a good practice. In short no shady link building techniques work. An ideal link profile will consist of anchor texts that are either brand terms or title of the post or other natural identifiers such as Click here. If you think about it, say you read an article that was very useful and wanted to link to it, would you use a keyword as anchor text or brand name as anchor text? Obviously you will chose the latter. So in order to have natural looking link profile, do not focus on keyword rich anchor text, focus on high quality relevant sites, focus on high quality content and more importantly focus on the target audience.
- Sajeet
-
Hi Mark,
With internal linking, your anchor text needs to be as descriptive as possible. Look at the page it leads to - does the anchor text accurately describe that? However, do not be spammy with it. Keep it clean and engaging and you will find people will click on it.
-Andy
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
-
Link Building
We have just recently launched a new website in Australia and as l am new to the SEO community, l was looking for a little advice on link building. Where is best to start? There are not many authorative websites for our industry. Are there specific websites that are good to link to? Are there any good tools to assist with this? Any help would be great. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
E-commerce site, one product multiple categories best practice
Hi there, We have an e-commerce shopping site with over 8000 products and over 100 categories. Some sub categories belong to multiple categories - for example, A Christmas trees can be under "Gardening > Plants > Trees" and under "Gifts > Holidays > Christmas > Trees" The product itself (example: Scandinavian Xmas Tree) can naturally belong to both these categories as well. Naturally these two (or more) categories have different breadcrumbs, different navigation bars, etc. From an SEO point of view, to avoid duplicate content issues, I see the following options: Use the same URL and change the content of the page (breadcrumbs and menus) based on the referral path. Kind of cloaking. Use the same URL and display only one "main" version of breadcrumbs and menus. Possibly add the other "not main" categories as links to the category / product page. Use a different URL based on where we came from and do nothing (will create essentially the same content on different urls except breadcrumbs and menus - there's a possibiliy to change the category text and page title as well) Use a different URL based on where we came from with different menus and breadcrumbs and use rel=canonical that points to the "main" category / product pages This is a very interesting issue and I would love to hear what you guys think as we are finalizing plans for a new website and would like to get the most out of it. Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arikbar0 -
Best way to handle traffic from links brought in from old domain.
I've seen many versions of answers to this question both in the forum, and throughout the internet... However, none of them seem to specifically address this particular situation. Here goes: I work for a company that has a website (www.example.com) but has also operated under a few different names in the past. I discovered that a friend of the company was still holding onto one of the domains that belonged to one of the older versions of the company (www.asample.com) and he was kind enough to transfer it into our account. My first reaction was to simply 301 redirect the older to the newer. After I did this, I discovered that there were still quite a few active and very relevant links to that domain, upon reporting this to the company owners they were suddenly concerned that a customer may feel misdirected by clicking www.asample.com and having www.example.com pop up. So I constructed a single page on the old domain that explained that www.asample.com was now called www.example.com and provided a link. We recently did a little house cleaning and moved all of our online holdings "under one roof" so to speak, and when the rep was going over things with the owners began to exclaim that this was a horrible idea, and that domain should instead be linked to it's own hosting account, and wordpress (or some other CMS) should be installed, and a few pages of content about the companies/subject should be posted. So the question: Which one of these is the most beneficial to the site and the business that are currently operating (www.example.com?) I don't see a real problem with any of these answers, but I do see a potentially un-needed expense in the third solution if a simple 301 will bring about the most value. Anyone else dealt with a situation like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modulusman0 -
Is This 301 Use Best Practice??
I know its effective practice cuz we're getting our arse kicked. I'm curious if its best practice (white, gray or black hat). I'm checking a competitors link profile on its landing page that is hitting the top of page 1 for several keywords. This competitor (national chain) has a strong domain authority (69). The particular landing page I'm checking in OSE has two 301 redirects from its own site among some other directory links to the page. The page shows 15 external links and half of them are very strong including it's own 301's. Aren't they essentially sending their own juice to the landing page to bolster page/domain authority to rank higher in the SERPS for those keywords? Is this a common practice using the 301's to a landing page? Is it white, gray or black hat? They are appearing suddenly appearing on the first page for several category keywords, so we're doing some snooping. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Site views messy in a text browser, but can see all text, is that a problem?
In Google's webmaster guidelines, they mention to view your site in a text browser to ensure all text is visible. All of our text is visible, but is very messy and is all jumbled on the page. I've noticed most sites text browser layout is clean. H How important is it to SEO that the site views cleanly in a text browser? Does anyone know of any feedback from Google engineers about this point?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Outgoing affiliate links and link juice
I have some affiliate websites which have loads of outgoing affiliate links. I've discussed this with a SEO friend and talked about the effect of the link juice going out to the affiliate sites. To minimize this I've put "no follows" on the affiliate links but my friend says that even if you have no follow Google still then diminishes the amount of juice that goes to internal pages, for example if the page has 10 links, 9 are affiliate with no follow - Google will only give 10% of the juice to the 1 internal page. Does anyone know if this is the case? and whether there are any good techniques to keep as much link juice on the site as possible without transferring to affiliate links? Appreciate any thoughts on this! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ventura0 -
What should my optimal anchor text look like, given cannibalization risk?
We have a content page with the explicit goal of ranking highly for "raised garden beds". We drive traffic from this page to our various types of raised garden beds in our store. The "FarmsteadRaised Garden Bed" is one such product. http://eartheasy.com/grow_raised_beds.htm Should we avoid using "raised garden beds" in the anchor text of the internal links pointing to the products in our store because of cannibalization? We recently changed the anchor text of the internal links to have keywords instead of just "click here" or "more info" - was this a good idea? What should our optimal anchor text look like?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aran0880 -
Best tool to calculate link distribution?
What is the best tool to calculate the total link distribution throughout a site? I know opensiteexplorer.com's "top pages" breaks down the numbers for you? Are there any others?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0