Test Results: Anchor Text Selection, What to Use and Where

Hi all,

Here's the results of the latest tests I made concerning where to place your keyword rich anchors and where to place your supporting anchors (brand, URL, misc).

Terminology:

Fictional Example: www.grill-it.com
Target keyword: best bbq grill

Critical Keywords:

Exact match anchor (EMA): best bbq grill
Synonym anchor: top barbecue cooker​

Non-Critical Keywords:

Niche anchor: outdoor cooking
Brand anchor: Grill It
URL anchor: www.grill-it.com, http://grill-it.com, http://www.grill-it.com, etc
Misc anchor: click here, read more​

Test Site A:

Test Site A goes after a very trivial, yet competitive keyword (not the one used in the example above). Onsite SEO is perfectly setup: very conservative for 2014 standards, only 3-4 instances of target keyword, many synonyms.

Sent 3 high PR/PA/DA backlinks with critical anchor text (exact match and synonyms) from relevant sites. These were sourced from my private network and sent to the test site. The non-critical keywords are coming from 9 web 2.0s.

• 3 high PR/PA/DA backlinks
• 9 web 2.0 backlinks

Results:



Test Site B:

Test Site B goes after the same keyword as test site A. These sites are nearly identical in site structure and content, but completely unique content and copyscape passed.

Sent critical keywords from both high PR/PA/DA sites and web 2.0s. I sent the same anchors as above, just from different source ratios. The high PR/PA/DA sites linking to Site B are the same that link to Site A, with two additional sites, equally as powerful.

• 6 high PR/PA/DA backlinks
• 6 web 2.0 backlinks

Results:



Conclusion:

Send your target keyword rich anchors only from high powered backlink sources, and save your non-critical anchors for your typical anchor text diversification platforms. This will get you a better result, and you won't need as many links from the paid sources (high PR/PA/DA).

Hope this helps in your link building plans.

 

Great post once again.. Always helpful and informative.

@Xtenismon I have been using diggity for my back links lately.. He chose my anchor text and I had 2-3 sites go from page infinity on google to the second page pretty quickly

 

You need to change your name to Professor Diggity Thanks for the incisive experiments.