hello all, everybody knows that if you want to rank well for the word "games" let's say, you need to get a lot of links pointing to your site with the anchor text "games". but what happens if google sees that a whole lot of backlinks to a site having the same anchor text. do you think it will consider it as spam? if you think a bit about it, it kinda looks like spam. natural backlinks that other people would build for you will have various anchor texts like: click here, this website, more games..... what is your experience with this aspect of SEO?
"natural linking" has obviously variations, so you should avoid having always the same anchor text in your links. Now, coming to the word "games". You're right, you need a *lot* of links. The site ranking #1 in Google has some 324,000 incoming links. And even word, even if you top that, you still wouldn't get into the top spot because it's a PR7 site. Which means that it's a very well established site with quite a few years (it was created 10 years ago) and a lot of reputation in front of Google. Trying to beat that is pure madness unless you have a few million dollars and a few years to dedicate to this purpose. I strongly advise you to target long-tail keywords containing the word "games" if that is your market, because the word itself is a waste of time. (BTW, #2 for that keyword is also a PR7 & the rest of the sites on the first page are all PR6 to PR8, with the only PR4 site having "only" 64,000 incoming links, though Yahoo reports 80,000 ones).
thats why no one should link using the same anchor text. idea is to spread the links over to your main page as well as to some inner pages using various anchor texts.
crisT, as noted above, I would recommend that you come up with maybe half a dozen variations, all with the word "games" in them (or whatever your main keyword actually is). For example — "video games online", "games for children", "play games online", etc., etc. Of course, these are just examples to illustrate the idea. In reality, you will create these variations of "games" (or your keyword) according to what you keyword research suggests to you. Then alternate these variations in your submissions.
Yes, it is spam and search engine will consider your web site as a spammer if you continue to use the same anchor text. If you want to target for a keyword such as (games), then you can target for it using different anchors, like: Online Games, Flash Games, Best Games, Kid Games, etc... The selection of keywords depends on your web site content. In that way you keep targeting for the keyword games and in the same time you are targeting for other important keywords. Also, you need to target for keywords that represent your web site content as you can not target for keywords that has nothing to do with your web site content.
Yes, it will surely look as spam. You must use variations, and also some nofollow links. some high pr links and also some low pr links to look it more natural.
Fully agree- I'd also suggest that apart from varying these anchor texts, you also vary the links, doing deep linking to individual pages, not only your main site page.
On this type of topics,there would be different sides to the story with each side having a proof or basis for saying so.Maybe everyone should do what is right in their mind.
I understand your point, but if it's bothering you maybe you shouldn't use your keyword to create backlinks
for me what matter is the relevancy of the text... lets say to put games as anchor but your site is not about games that consider spamming and not relevant.
The real answer is "it depends" as with almost everything in SEO. If you have 10,000 inbound links to a page and 1 is using "video games" and 9,999 are using "games", the search engines are NOT necessarily going to see this as unnatural. For instance, it may be that you have links from 2 domains. The first domain has a single link to your site on a single page with the link text "video games". The second domain might have 9,999 pages indexed and perhaps gave you a blogroll or footer link with the link text "games". This is TOTALLY acceptable and NOT considered spammy links. Now, if you have many domains linking to you and they ALL used the exact same link text, that might raise some flags. Your site might get flagged automatically for a review. So it's probably some function of the # of keyword variations in the link text of your inbounds, the # of domains linking to your URL, and the # of links linking to your URL that determine whether their algorithm might consider your back link profile for that URL "unnatural" and trigger a review by a Googler. As long as the number of domains linking to your URL is low or the number of links to your URL is low, it probably doesn't matter at all how many variations you have. But it is a good idea to vary your link text... not just to look natural but also to help your rank for LOTS of variations of the targeted keyword phrase(s). As sultanofseo mentioned, you should be building links to LOTS of pages on your site, not just the home page. This is how you increase your site's domain authority. And you should vary the link text for each of those pages.
I dont think it will be considered as spam if you have got from other websites . If your website is popular then it will add extra bonus.