DeadFly SEO

Is there such a thing as great anchor text?

Yes and no. Using Google tools you can see a comparison of your anchor text and the text on your page. But first what is anchor text? It is the text that is on someone else’s website that hyper links to your site, i.e. the part that changes color, not the description if there is one. So for my little site on the Camino because the main search term I wanted found for was Camino de Santiago - that is what I asked webmasters to use as the anchor text. A lot did, many didn’t, and I was lucky that they did not.

You need a good variation of anchor text pointing to your site otherwise the search engines will just think that you are trying to spam them - and they are right - that is what you are doing. For this you will suffer the frustration of sitting on the second page or at 9 or 10 on the front page getting little traffic for all that work you have put into building links. You will see sites with fewer links than you march up ahead and stay there while you suffer the penalty of your ignorance.

I spammed the search engines when I started and still have sites that seemed like a good idea sitting on page 5 or 6 a year later. I live in the hope that time will help but I really don’t know how much time will be required, at least they did not get thrown out of the index.

I still build links every day for various site. I use some software, email, and the telephone an under used resource on the net. I want to get about half of the links with my keywords, for the rest I just want a link - I don’t care if it has a no follow tag attached. Google are getting better all the time, right now some older sites are suffering from the last indexing in December from their earlier spammy behavior many years back, dropping from no. 1 to no. 6 on the SERP. See WMW Following on from this I am willing to bet, and do so with my time, that Google will compare follow and no follow links in the future.

So what is there to learn from this? Mix up the anchor text - simple.