Hello, One of my websites recently received a good number of natural links from various websites. The problem is that most of such links are image links or links with the URL only, without an anchor. Are these links valuable? Should I politely ask the webmasters to change the anchors?
Depends on they are clickable or not ..if yes then they are passing link juice to you but not the anchor text benefit. If you think that they will change the anchors then you should go ahead,.
It's Beneficial For You and Also I thinks You should try to ask the Webmaster for the putting the Anchor text.
If the links are able to be clicked on, then they would be worth while, but if they are not able to be clicked on then they would not be worth while.
Google wants to recognize natural links and uses them to measure a site's worth. Their algo takes this into consideration so the url alone should benefit you, especially from a site with authority that are without the nofollow attribute. If they are used in context with relevant surrounding keyword text, the additional anchor won't matter much. If it is merely a url in a blogroll or side bar, it won't help you as much. It really depends on the context in which the link is used.
It helps a lot if the image has ALT text - the ALT text will somewhat act as anchor text. I've seen this in many backlink checker programs.
Anchor text is quite important. Anchor text is what makes a link beneficiary for a site. Anyway, natural links are natural and they will help no matter what the anchor text is. You should not worry about anchor text when your site gets natural links.
If they are directing to an image, your image might get ranked well in image search; which could get you more visitors. However links with anchor tags and keywords are the ones that help get pages on a website rank better.
Google uses anchor text as a means to understand what your site is about. If you get too many repetative meaningless links then it can affect serps negatively!
relevance has many aspects, for example if you look and try to mimic natural links, you will find that a lot of edu resource pages will link to websites without any anchors, but the text surrounding the link, and the meta title of the page itself is extremely relevant, so i would say those links will help just as much as a link without anchor, personally if i am the one adding, buying, or asking for the links, then of course I'll use anchor, but i try to mix my link portfolio up with some naked links too .. i can't really comment about your links since i don't know them, but if those pages are somehow relevant to your content, then they will help.
Though not as good as anchor text links, they are still benificial for your site. But you still need to get more anchor text back links with your keywords to increase your rankings in google.