As you know, the Penguin update, which gave SEOs a hard time last year, was about links and link structures. After the video-article I mentioned a few weeks ago regarding link chronology, I want to underline the importance of Anchor Text optimization. First of all, for those who are new to SEO, and for those hearing about anchor text for the first time, I recommend reading my “What is Anchor Text” post, which I previously published under the simple SEO category, and then coming back here.
Anchor Text Optimization
Dear friends, after Penguin, many large sites lost rankings under the name of external links due to reasons such as anchor text, nofollow-dofollow values, and chronologically high fluctuations. Actually, they didn’t receive a penalty; they just lost their ranking. People thought they were penalized and gave up hope on the site, whereas this was not a penalty, but a negative effect according to the new algorithm.
How Should Anchor Text Acquisition Be?
It is such a critical issue that it is a situation where we need to be very meticulous, especially for a newly opened system where categories haven’t settled yet and links going deep from the homepage aren’t fully established; it is a very, very, very important factor. I will try to explain the method I use myself. Let there be 2 different scenarios: 1- Anchor text for a newly opened website, 2 – A website that has lost rankings or is likely to lose them due to anchor text optimization.
Anchor Text Strategy for a Newly Opened Website;
First of all, we shouldn’t start working without fully forming the site map in our minds. Initially, the links you acquire will be much more solid without a “title” tag. Try to acquire anchor texts for your homepage in 3-4 different ways; for example, for seogaste, it would be beneficial to acquire them as “digital marketing”, “seo”, “seo expert”, “özgür gündüz”. We must maintain this ratio in the following months without exaggerating it too much. And as I mentioned in my 2014 organic SEO article, getting links and anchor texts for the brand will benefit you this year.
For example, I can see that I will take a break from getting links for “özgür gündüz” for a while; it has turned very red. Let me tell you the policy I will follow: I will start acquiring them without title tags and proceed from that angle. Otherwise, if this ratio exceeds 50-60%, it poses a risk in terms of Penguin.
By the way, there is a great tool where you can analyze anchor text, which you can access here. (Note, of course, we can’t say it measures 100%; you know the links you have acquired much better. If you have kept the links acquired for the site from the very beginning, you can easily extract this report from Excel yourself. This tool is for lazy SEOs like me…)
Website that has lost rankings or is likely to lose them due to anchor text optimization
In such a situation, after performing our analysis again, we might see a loading of 60% and above on a single anchor for a single page. We should immediately intervene, reach out to those we can, and remove those titles. If we can’t reach them, we should start a new link building campaign by doing a good seeding, and by getting links without anchor text or with anchor texts that have never been acquired before, we should try to balance this ratio within 1-2 months.
In terms of SEO, Anchor text optimization, a topic that gained importance after Penguin, has become a situation we need to perform frequently..
Stay standard..