Varying Anchor Text, Is It Good Or Bad For SEO?

February 9th, 2008 | 3,055 Views RSS Feed

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Recently, a Search Engine Watch Forums thread asked a question, whether it is helpful or harmful to vary your anchor text in your SEO efforts, and should the anchor text be differentiated or not?

“Hey Guys, If you had 5000 backlinks and 90% of them all used similar anchor text of 1-4 words, would you be concerned? I'm in a situation where I need to decide to differentiate my anchor text for natural appearance, or continue to build strong focused backlinks with the same anchor text. So far I have not seen any penalties and we are getting excellent SERPs with the way things have gone, but I'm concerned this may not stay the same if Google decides our back link summary is not natural.Any opinions?”

The answer to this quizzical is yes, you do need to vary your anchor text, as is echoed by AussieWebmaster on the forum, “always vary your anchor text – for that number you should have 20-25 different keywords at the low end”

While there's no favorite area for doing so, it needs to be optimized well. What you should do is make sure that the anchor text is well optimized, moreover you need to make sure that such an effort doesn't look unnatural or spammy.

The discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

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Comments

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41345 Responses2008-02-09+13%3A37%3A49Navneet+Kaushal to “Varying Anchor Text, Is It Good Or Bad For SEO?”

Page Rank » Blog Archive » Varying Anchor Text, Is It Good Or Bad For SEO? Says:
February 9th, 2008 at 07:50
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere's a quick excerptRecently, a Search Engine Watch Forums thread asked a question, whether it is helpful or harmful to vary your anchor text in your SEO efforts, and should the anchor text be differentiated or not? “Hey Guys, If you had 5000 backlinks and … [...]
Sergey Rusak Says:
February 9th, 2008 at 15:03
Anchor should be different because similar anchor look spammy for Google and other search engines.
Also, it is very dangerous to change anchor on the links which already online. You can't contact webmasters to change anchor text after link was indexed by search engines. It is #1 sign that you are trying to reach top search engine positions and called "anchor spam".
digital underground Says:
March 15th, 2008 at 20:28
so what about the link train schemes would that be the same?
great stuff! Says:
October 30th, 2009 at 02:11
Thanks for the tip! I was SOOOO wondering this myself!! Its tough to vary it up all the time, and remember how you did it…especially if you outsource your tasks…but good to know!
Scott
jamie Says:
November 3rd, 2009 at 13:23
I would say yes. If you need 5000 keyword-rich links, then chances are you should worry more about the quality of the sites/pages linking to you, rather than the actual anchor text. Anchor text is important, but if the site/page has no authority, it's not really gonna help you that much.