What’s the importance of having different anchor text in backlinks?

I’m interested in knowing how important it is to have different anchor text from your websites backlinks.


Let’s say I have a poker site and I want to rank well for the term “online poker” would it be best for me to use “online poker” as the anchor text from all sites linking to mine or would I be better off using several different anchor text phrases, such as “free poker”, “poker game”, “play poker” etc.?

 

In an ideal world you should use the anchor text that matches the terms you want to rank for.

However google likes sites to have natural linking patterns so if all your links have the same anchor text it will probably hold you back with some kind of penalty.

I suggest varying anchor text around the target keywords like you say. Also include some deep links.

Having said this if your site is a few years old you probably won't get a penalty for a few unnatural links.

 

Using different keywords in ankor text is best....use Coop and linkvault to get the links out to many sites with very little work. Withing a few weeks you can have your ankor text showing on 1000's of sites around the web. Works well!

 

Agree with the above...Google wants to see natural linking to your site, so if its see the same anchor text over and over again...red flag goes up and it starts to penalize your site for link spamming. However, any links beats no links...

 

Yea what they said ^^

 

I had the exact question. Thanks for the answers.

Can anyone show me a website that they have that has coop ads on there?

 

Im still wary. I keep expecting this whole coop thing to blow up in everyone's faces every time I come here to read. It just seems spammy and artificial.

If google doesnt like link farms, blog comment spamming, linking all your sites together in a network, etc. etc. etc. then why does it tolerate the coop? The obvious intention of the coop is exactly the same as all those link spammers. No difference at all in that respect.

Google seems to basically dislike anything a webmaster does to get ahead because it messes with their search results relevance. And the coop seems to be one of those things we use to get ahead.

That being said they don't seem to have done anything so far. Why is that?

 

They do take into account the age of every link they know about and give it more weight depending on how old it is so coop links don't fare too well in this department.

I think thats as far as they need to go to penalise coop type schemes really.

 

Very very important to use the anchor text that matches the terms you want to rank for. I use 10 different anchor text when submitting my travel site