[COLOR=“Black”]if say you have a variety of 100 incoming links (forum sigs, articles, directories etc),
I am on about all 100 of these being Anchor texts (with your own control)
How many of these anchor texts would you typically make to be be the ‘actual keyword’ /what your page content is about?
how many anchor texts from the 100 would be variation/similar terms of it (LSI terms)
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and how many would be extensions (long tail keywords)?
(eg, Health clinic, ‘health clinic usa’ would be the extension)[COLOR=“Black”]
What would be typical ratios of the above? (to get good SEO rankings, and i know it depends on onpage factors too, but just roughly) ?[/COLOR]
You can’t count links as the value of each link is different. You can’t even estimate by toolbar PR and counting links per page, because context (both the context of the page and the context of where your link is within the page) matter.
If you’re spending your time going out and placing links to yourself, you’re spending it on the wrong thing.
Plus, if you have too many instances of the same anchor text it could hurt your backlinks since (with the exception of your domain name) that wouldn’t be natural. If hundreds of sites linked to yours naturally the anchor text would vary significantly and that’s an indicator of naturally acquired bakclinks rather than spammed backlinks.
It won’t hurt you, just help less. There are lots of non-spammy reasons for there to exist identical backlinks, like those associated with free tools for webmasters. The default theme of every WordPress install links back to the WordPress site identically. My W3Counter has some 2 million links showing on Yahoo! Site Explorer from the tracking code. The site has no problems with SEO.
It looks neither natural nor unnatural. Variety of anchor text alone doesn’t give you enough information to determine whether links are unnatural. There are plenty of examples where a webmaster is probably going to link to a page with the same anchor text that most other webmasters linked with - and it isn’t the domain name. Look at the “all in one SEO pack” plugin page. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that the anchor text used was predominantly “all in one SEO pack”. And why shouldn’t it be?
You can’t be sure about that Dan unless you have inside knowledge. Google admit there are ways to hurt competitors and backlinks would be the easiest way to do it, the only way to do it frankly. It’s why there are ‘google bowling’ services available.
If you take the OP’s scenario, 100 links from a variety of sources but they all have identical anchor text that isn’t the domain name, how natural is that going to look to Google? At best the links get nerfed and they just fail to help you, at worst it might cause a penalty (which is why I used the word ‘could’), probably based on site authority/trusted site status removal.
The example you give of your own site is one that could easily be identified as a common identical anchor text scenario by Google and removed from the algo. It doesn’t mean that ANY identical anchor text scenario is equally harmless.
On reflection I don’t agree with this either. It’s perfectly normal and acceptable to market your own site. As a marketing Guru you must have advised people in the past on how to market themselves and provide ways of pulling traffic into their sites including establishing their own backlinks on 3rd party sites.
It’s also a great way kickstart the process of acquiring ‘natural’ links.
Yeah but those won’t be context related sites generally and the links from them will weighted accordingly, nor will they be penalised because it’s obvious what they are. Google aren’t stupid.
Off Topic:
By the way, I don’t use Twitter myself but I can imagine how useful your new Follow Ham tool would be to someone who does and it’s also a great example of how to acquire good quality natural backlinks. You have 11 at the moment, most of which you created yourself (no comment :p) I’ll be interested to see how that changes over coming weeks.
So are you saying that it’s impossible to create an unnatural looking backlink profile? Either you’re going to say yes it’s impossible or no it’s not impossible in which case what’s your threshold/definition for an unnatural profile?
LOL, you are the one who is claiming that too many instances of the same anchor text might hurt you:
Why don’t you give us your definition of “too many”, seeing as it’s you who is making the claim?
But what about the “all in one seo pack” plugin page example? That page has attracted masses of links with anchor text that is predominantly “all in one seo pack”. It’s the best description for the page, and I suspect that most people link to it with that anchor text with no prompting. What’s unnatural about that?
I’m not convinced there is such a thing as “authority/trusted site status”. Authority and trust follow naturally from a PageRank algorithm that effectively filters manipulating links. There’s no need for a second system outside of PageRank to establish the same property of a page. It’s not something I can prove or disprove though.
Signing up with 101 social bookmarking sites and plopping your URL in the boxes is not effective marketing. I tell people to create products, services or content that are good enough that once they get someone to their site, some of them will want to link back to the site. Those are the links that count, not the ones you create.
I only created three links to the site – a tweet, which is nofollow, a review request at Hacker News where old stories get deleted after a few days, and a post on my blog. So, one weak backlink by mentioning my new site on my blog. That’s hardly the kind of “backlink building” I’m telling people not to waste their time on.
That account sent out tweets letting people know their results were ready for viewing. When I posted the review request at Hacker News, usage was so high that the account was automatically suspended for sending updates too fast. It’ll probably be reopened after a human review, it’s happened before.
You didn’t answer the question, do think it’s possible or not? Either you can hurt people with backlinks or you can’t and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that you can. Which side do you come down on?
Not sure what your’e doing here Hoop, it’s not exactly the first time this subject has come up.
That’s interesting because over the last 18 months I’ve become convinced that aside from relevance as the primary ranking signal, that’s how the SERP works. It makes sense, the phrase ‘Trust rank’ has been bandied around for years and one of the biggest bits of actual evidence is that occasionally I’ll come across pages that simply don’t appear to have any justification for ranking where they do, no PR, hardly any relevance, no backlinks, but they outrank pages that do have those things and they’re always part of a larger site. The implication is that the site is passing on some kind of Authority or trust or whatever you want to call it. Google place a lot of stock in trust.
You self created some links with the purpose of creating a little interest in your new gadget. You didn’t create many sure but you did the thing you’re telling people not to do. It didn’t need many because I’m sure once people find out about it it will create a lot of genuine good quality links because it looks really useful. Fab, but what do you do if you’re trying to promote a site about sheet metal processing and you don’t have the kind of skills and innovative abilities that you clearly have to create some redhot link bait like the Spamorham gadget?
That’s not what the people talking about bookmarking on this forum are doing though. They’re not going out there and trying to reach people to promote their sites. They’re looking up “100 dofollow X” lists and filling out a million forms thinking that they’re “building backlinks”. They know that none of those links are anywhere people will ever see them, they’re not marketing, they’re “building backlinks”. Except, since they’re both where nobody will see them and in places Google will ignore, they’re actually just wasting time.
I couldn’t find anything in post 5 that covered it. This is from post 5 though:
Here, (I think) you are saying that all those natural links to the “all in one SEO pack” plugin page look unnatural because they have predominantly the same anchor text, and will not help that page and might even hurt it. I don’t think that’s the case.
I totally agree that there plenty of scenarios where identical anchor text is coming in from a variety of types and contexts of site and it’s natural, maybe Google has a way to identify the targets of those links and ascertain whether or not it’s the type of site that would acquire those types of backlinks, like a software site might but a shete metal processing site wouldn’t, and that’s how they spot people trying to manipulate the algo. They can do it with paid links, why not with this?
You still haven’t answered the question about hurting people (or yourself) with backlinks mate, do you think it can be done? There’s no fence to sit on with this one, either it’s a possiblilty or it’s not. If you think it’s a possibility then what are we actually discussing here? And if you think it’s not then how do you know that for sure?
That makes sense. So we seem to agree that we can’t determine whether links are natural or unnatural based on anchor text alone; we need to look at more information.
My gut feeling is that links alone can’t hurt you, but I have no proof one way or the other. Maybe, as you’ve suggested above, the linked page is assessed as well as the links themselves. In that case maybe links + attributes of linked page are both used together.
You’re getting ahead of yourself here. Without the identical anchor text, this situation doesn’t exist in the first place, without it Google has no trigger to look for other factors to decide if it’s manipulation or a genuine link profile. So by varying your anchor text, you avoid the risk of being penalised if you don’t fit an acceptable profile. I’d say that was a good enough reason to vary anchor text just on it’s own.
Maybe we could just say that if you ARE manipulating then you should vary your anchor text just to be on the safe side.
Well actually you do have a several clues. One is that Google admit that competitors can hurt your rankings. Another is the existence of Google Bowling services. There’s also anecdotal evidence from people who think they’ve been sabotaged by competitors through bad links and then there’s the logic that really there isn’t much a competitor can do to hurt your rankings except by using links (ruling out hacking etc here).
You were saying earlier that identical anchor text was a necessary and sufficient condition for a possible penalty. Now you’re saying it’s merely a trigger for further investigation. These are two different claims. I’d agree with the second one only, as there is evidence to refute the first claim (the example I gave). If, only after further investigation, a penalty is given, then it is because the links + attributes of linked page + whatever else, meet some criteria and not the anchor text alone - as I said earlier.
You’re assuming that the only way to hurt a competitor’s site is with links.
The existence of a service doesn’t mean that the service is of any use! It just means that there are people claiming that it works and willing to take peoples’ money for it. E.g. spammy SEO’s who still charge for submission to thousands of search engines. I got a note through my door the other day from someone claiming to be a witch doctor! Just because he is offering the service, it doesn’t mean that it works.
There’s only one claim here going on here Hoop, nothing is ever taken on it’s own in SEO, I didn’t think I needed to say that. Maybe I wasn’t clear but identical anchor text is only relevant in the context of all the sites it exists on and the site it points to, it can’t be taken on it’s own can it, it can only exist in a link from a site to another site and it’s those factors in conjunction with that identical anchor text that form the whole issue.
By being so pedantic you’ve helped an force an clarification that I hadn’t realised was necessary. I think that’s probably a good thing.
Can’t think of any other ways to do it that don’t involve hacking or other on-site attacks, can you?
Of course not but where there’s smoke there’s fire.
