OK, I have been developing a couple of websites now for a while but am still confused about link building. I am hoping that by answering the following questions I can become better at and less frustrated with link building: 1. What percentage of backlinks should be anchor text and what percentage should be URL? I am kinda aiming for 90% Anchor and the rest URL. My feeling is that this would seem suspicious/unnatural to Google. Is this the case? 2. Does Google become suspicious of linking with too many of the same keyword/phrase. If 99% of my links came from an anchor text - say "flower gifts" would it penalize/ignore many of these links? I feel like I have hit a brick wall as I'm getting nowhere with a keyword and am thinking it is because I am concentrating on it too much. 3. By linking dramatically with one anchor text, would this hamper the efforts made with other phrases? I have noticed that some keyword suffer when I concentrate on other ones. 4. Regarding article submission: Is there any benefits to submitting the same article to tens or hundreds of article sites? 5. Are links from directories worth anything? I haven't concentrated on them in a long time as read in a few places that they were worthless. Thanks for reading this and for any responses!!!
Very good questions here. I don't have the answers Just my opinion. 1) I think a lot of it would depend also on the site the link is on. I mean, if google views it as a poor quality site then the link will count but count for much less. Anyway, I think nothing wrong with doing most of your links with anchor text, as you will find some sites don't accept anchor text and will use the url only (especially when submitting articles). So you'll still get url only links even though you were trying for anchor text. 2) I would be more worried about Google seeing a sudden burst of links (hi xrummer) than what the phrase linking to your site contains. I'd like to hear other people's views on this as well. 3) You'll definitely rank better for that phrase, but also remember it depends a lot on what keyword is on the page you are linking to. What I try to do is group keywords into phrases or similar groups and link like that. So "flower gifts" would be one, "cheap flower gifts" would be another and on and on. The down side is that there are so many keywords for phrases that you just have to accept that you can't own them all. Pick two or three and then try to get all the long tail/variations in those groups. 4) I don't see why not. Of course they won't be super quality, but a link is a link in my books. What would rank better? Quality content site with no links or quality content site with links? I think that latter would. 5) It definitely won't hurt doing it but just don't expect it to push your site to page one. I think there is a LOT that goes into link building and the more you think about the more you lose your mind Is what your doing now working for you? Just remember it can take time to see results especially if you are trying to target a phrase that is very competitive. Just keep at it. Hope that helps.
I think google likes anchor better rather then just links.. IE: Need suggestions on creating links directory. compared too: Building links directory - Need Your Suggestions: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1653845
Thanks for the feedback. - I know what you're saying about losing your mind - It does feel like that sometimes! What I am doing now is certainly working in terms of PR but serp results are not as good as they could be. There are newer sites with less site updates, and much less content doing better than me which is really doing my head in!