ive seen a lot of ppl on this forum advising to vary your anchor text a lot when building links. I was just wondering why, it seems like if you are trying to rank for certain keywords you should just use those as the anchor text ...
May I know the reason on why you have a signature link? That's the reason,. forum posting(with signature) is one way of link building., Many prefer this seo avenue because bots loves fresh contents and every post and thread here are considered fresh contents. Bots frequently crawled forums and once you have a signature on it, your link will also be crawled by bots
Remember that in google's white hat world you're not supposed to do anything to build links other than create "great content". If you suddenly get a load of links with exactly the same anchor text, it may not look like a natural link building pattern to google, and they may start ignoring links, or actually give you a penalty. Therefore, to be on the safe side, it's better to vary your anchor text.
It's because in Google's "ideal" world they want links to be accumulated naturally by people who appreciate your site, and if you have clearly had an input into your own backlinks, then that devalues them (slightly). If all of your links have the same anchor text, then the chances are that you've made that way, which is something anyone can do, and so rewarding these kind of links will not necessarily put the best sites at the top. And so if you don't have any variation in your anchor text, search engines will most likely figure out that you're building or specifically requesting your own links, which as you can imagine, devalues them as reliable "votes" for your website's quality, and could even warrant a penalty from the search engine.
As Magda said, building links with only one anchor text looks unnatural, and Google is bound to smell something fishy.
There are several reasons to vary link text... First and foremost, as others have already stated, is that it looks totally unnatural for all inbound links to a particular URL to have the exact same link text. It's an SEO footprint easily detected algorithmically by Google and other engines, yet this method of detection can easily be avoided by simply varying your link text. The second major reason that I can think of is that varying the link text makes your page rank for all kinds of slight variations of the targeted keyword phrase that you might not have considered while ALSO helping your rank for the targeted keyword phrase. If you're trying to rank for "car maintenance" then having links w/ link text like "summer car maintenance", "winter car maintenance", "car maintenance tips", "car maintenance tools", etc. will ALL help you rank for "car maintenance". Sure... inbound links to your URL with link text that EXACTLY match the targeted keyword phrase help the most, but if you trip a filter that causes them all to be devalued or not counted at all THEN what good are they? If you are trying to rank for a particular keyword phrase and performing link building activities (unnatural link building like blog commenting, forum posting, directory submissions, article submissions, etc.) then I would suggest having about 40% of the inbound links exactly matching the targeted keyword phrases and the remainder of the links using lots of slight variations of the targeted keyword phrase.
when doing link building, the objective is to make the process as natural as possible, using the same anchor all the time is not natural. Keep your main keyword in all anchors, but surround it by other words
This is a very helpful subject. Thank you very much. I am a newbie to seo and i have just started my first marketing campaign for one of my websites... the replies are great and insightful.. thank you guys for sharing...
The focus is usually on anchor text, in regards to obtaining bartered or paid links. A webmaster will immediately ask for their top keyword to be linked to the homepage. Also, a secondary keyword will be requested to be linked to its corresponding internal optimized landing page. And wisely, so. It is industry standard to wish to rank higher for that keyword. The end result desired is getting links with that keyword!
The idea is that, google has gotten way too smart for webmasters. It is now has been using Latent Sematic Indexing... you can check this out by doing search. It basically advices webmasters to present contents just like a professional writer would, thus eliminating scams...
search engine crawler follows the website anchor tags in searching and finding new webpages to be indexed in google or other major search engines. If you are using same anchor tag in website interlinking and link distribution then you can come under penalization. so you should try to change your anchor tag time to time.
Because in Google's eyes - SEO's shouldn't exist! All the rankings should be natural. All the links should be natural. All the content should be natural. The nature of our job is to manipulate the search engines - they're obviously not going to like this! So, if ALL your links use the same keyword - how natural does that look? Not very! It is possible to be penalized for 'Over' Optimisation.
It is more natural to be varied, if its all the same it will flag the search engines that you are attemting to manipulate the search results.