So I have read a great deal of information regarding SEO in both books and online and it seems there is some difference of opinion on whether or not to vary your anchor text in backlinks. Some believe that the more links you have anchored "blue widget" the better, other say that this is bad and an easily detected link pattern by search engines and you might actually be incurring a ranking penalty and that you should use varied anchor texts that contain your main phrase as well (ie "best blue widget" "blue widget" "blue widgets online" ect..) What are your experiences and thoughts?
Google wants to see "natural" linking patterns. It is normal to have varied anchor texts. Think about all of the links on the web that point to Facebook.com or Google.com. Do you think all of the anchor texts say exactly "Facebook" or "Google"? No, they are probably all varied. From my experience and my friends' experiences, it is good to have variations.
Yeah I think you're right, I used to not vary my anchor text at all and even had a page dissapear from the 2nd spot on serps(to being nowhere) for a month because i think i overused the same anchor text in links
Tbh i always start off with one and asd i get higher up the rankings you start to rank higher for other terms. These term also bring in traffic and start converting so promote them also. Promoting more than one keyword can bring a lot more traffic than just trying one!
absolutely vary your anchor text. Very rarely will the same anchor text be the same for every link - fall outside of the "normalcy" pattern, and welcome to the webspam filter / sandbox!
Thanks jessie, i think thats exactly what happened to a few of my pages, was using the same anchor text and suddenly vanished entirely from the serps (just those pages not the site entirely)
The key is to keep things random. You should vary the anchor text, but you should also vary the urls too, so that some point to deeper pages within your site.