Getting the Most out Of Your Anchor Text: It’s not as Simple as you Think
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For any SEO campaign, whitehat or blackhat, anchor text is imperative. Just getting you backlinks doesn’t matter without proper anchor text. That’s a given, that almost every SEO knows. But today we’re going to explore variance of anchor text, and how it affects ranking (especially in SEO campaigns where links are gotten quickly)
For this entry, we will pretend we’re trying to rank for Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes
How it Used to Work
Back in the day, trying to rank for “Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes” would mean you spam or send out your link always using the anchor text “Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes”, and the ranking would appear. However, with the introduction of the sandbox, and a few other anti-spam constraints that Google has built in, this no longer works. At least not if you’re getting your rankings quickly.
Why This Doesn’t Work Now
The sandbox and other anti-spam constraints(including the anti-Google Bomb algorithm) means appearing too heavily for most less common niches results in penalization. On the chance that you can avoid that via slower link building, Still, you will rank for that keyterm, and probably nothing else. Neither situation is our best case scenario.
How it Works Now
Now, you can’t just spam out the same link text over and over and expect to rank (in most situations/niches). Beyond that, we want to rank for more than one keyterm. As a result, you have to make sure your anchor text varies in order to get into that top spot. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to say “fuck my targeted key phrase”, and use junk text. It’s possible to intelligently add your link text and come out on top.
How to Pick Intelligent Anchor Text
Now, the beauty of modern day anchor text is that there’s overlaps that benefit rankings. An overlap is a situation where multiple key phrases you use in anchor text happen to overlap certain words, but not the entire key phrase with eachother.
So we take a few key phrases, say “Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes”, “Discount Marlboro Cigarettes”, “Discount Cigarettes”,”Cheap Cigarettes”, and “Buy Marlboro Cigarettes”. Examine the table below to understand the crossovers that occur.
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Anchor Text Overlap Table |
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| Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes | Discount Marlboro Cigarettes | Discount Cigarettes | Cheap Cigarettes | Buy Marlboro Cigarettes | |
| Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes | |||||
| Discount Marlboro Cigarettes | |||||
| Discount Cigarettes | |||||
| Cheap Cigarettes | |||||
| Buy Marlboro Cigarettes | |||||
Analyizing our Table of Anchor Text�
Ok. So, looking at those overlaps, we can see what phrases(in addition to our selected of 5 keywords) we’re getting some anchor text power from.
We have the most overlaps for the word “Cigarettes”. This is good, as it’s our most competitive term. In addition to the overlaps that are only cigarettes, we have multiple overlaps involving that word. Now, we probably will not be ranking for cigarettes any time soon. However, it allows us the ability to rank for a lot of terms that are simply added on to cigarettes.
Since we have marlboro, cheap, and discount overlapping quite a lot as well, we are given extra power for anything involving those words. So “cheap cigarettes” would be drawing on the power of several keyphrases involving the word “cheap”, manymore involving the word “cigarettes”, and then get a LOT of juice from any that overlap with the phrase “cheap cigarettes” directly. So we’re doing good. That’s not our targeted keyphrase though. However, it’s important to realize exactly how much power we have for each of those terms individually, then combined with eachother. Now, adding in the word “marlboro”, we pull in yet more power from the overlaps, making us a shoo-in to rank.
So with that setup, we should easily be ranking for our desired phrase of “cheap marlboro cigarettes“. However, there’s so many different ways to distribute our anchor text into different possible searches, that we’ve actually probably picked up good rankings in several keywords, vs the one we probably would not have gotten if we’d used solely our own link text.
A Quick Code Gift from XMCP
I decided to give you guys a little piece of code I use in my automated submission programs to vary link text easily
function macroIt($line)
{
while(strpos($line,"}")!==FALSE AND strpos($line,"{")!==FALSE)
{
$start=strpos($line,"{");
$end=strpos($line,"}");
$tmp=substr($line,$start, $end-$start+1);
$tmp2=trim($tmp,"{}");
$spl=explode(",", $tmp2);
$index=rand(0, sizeof($spl)-1);
$line=str_replace($tmp, trim($spl[$index]), $line);
}
return($line);
}
Here’s how to use it.
$str=”{Hello, Hey, Hello there} {kind sir, good sir, m’lady, Mr.Johnson}, how are you {today, on this fine today, on this wonderful day}”;
$macroedText=macroIt($str);
Here’s what It would Produce (A few examples)
Hello there m’lady, how are you today?
Hello kind sir, how are you on this fine day?
Hey Mr.Johnson, how are you today?
Yeah, it’s beautiful.
Enjoy
-XMCP
December 17th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
You also need to make sure that if you want to rank for any single term (like “cigarettes”) you need some exact match anchor text too. Even if you had all the anchor text you provided you probably still wouldn’t rank for those one word phrases until you had a decent amount of anchor text with just those words. Google does this because sometimes a modifier can change the meaning of a word (e.g. searching for “video” or “video games”), so for the search engines to be sure they are the same they like to see exact matches as well. Once you get enough exact matches, your overlap anchor text will start to count for much more toward the specific words as well.
December 17th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Ah yes, definitely. I didn’t mention this specifically, although you’ll notice our targeted keyterm IS mentioned in the table.
But thanks for pointing that out.
December 17th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Anchor Texting Your Links Intelligently…
As search engines have come to rely more and more on inlinks rather than on-site factors, they’ve become a lot smarter in determining artificial linking patterns, too. Meaning that you can’t reasonably expect any success in competitive nich…
December 18th, 2007 at 12:08 am
Very good practical advice.
December 18th, 2007 at 12:42 am
Holy Cow Slight Shady! That was some great practical advice. I’ve always varied anchor text in the past, but constructing a matrix table like you did is pure gold
– Dev
December 18th, 2007 at 3:39 am
You haven’t mentioned how acronyms fall into the equation here. What if you target “search engine optimization” but also target “SEO”. There is no overlap here, The search engine doesn’t necessarily know how to determine a relation although there is one. So it’s double the work then?
December 18th, 2007 at 4:53 am
Your function’s name is macroIt … mine is textBlender. You work with {} I work with []
But mine is 2 years older … So yours gotta call it … Daddy!
PS: I used to use it for entire page generation. Writing many versions of paragraphs and they all ranked
December 18th, 2007 at 4:57 am
I forgot to mention that a post like this might bring you popularity but will also bring you much more competiton.
There’s outable techniques and there’s some worth keeping for yourself and close ones
It’s just my opinion.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Thanks for the code. It’s kind of like those article spinners where you put snippets.
December 18th, 2007 at 10:09 am
WoW Shady Artificial Intelegence!
Why not get a hand on a nice database and make theem assosiation based on selected variables.
For example, lets say you get a national concenses database data, You have city names, state names, gender, race, religion, education, profession…maybe more!
Now add some adjectives, modifying phrases, adverbs, pronouns, and create a comen theme!
You should be able to make logical sentences. Next make it user interactice, putting it in a widget with some reveting pictures, icons, and other micro media, when a user will mouse over, you can record the method and modify your results to server corelated onformation!
Well pertty much we will be building a search engine aka ShadyBot..:)
Hey, I do not remember if I told you yet, but will have my blog up soon, so come check it out.
http://www.igorthetroll.com/blog/
December 18th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Hey 5ubliminal. I wrote the post about this without concern for ‘outting’, because I did not learn the concept from any one person. The entry was a product of my own research. And as for the text shuffling; it’s a concept that has been around for ever. XRumer allows you to swap words, as does lot of e-mail marketing software. I know of one program in particular over 5 years old that allows the swapping of subject lines.
@Dev and Jeremy, glad you enjoyed it!
@Igor: Congrats, you’ve found the foundation of content generation (I know several who can generate unique, automatic, and pretty coherrent text). And I’ll definitely check the blog!
@Phil: Yup, it is double the work, and it’s especially rough because your most competitive phrase in each situation also happens to be the one splitting your traffic in two. I’d reccomend starting out the campaign using the most common crossover terms, with whichever acronym/non-acronym you feel like. Eventually, they should both stack up, and you could survive off longtail till then, god willing
December 18th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Of course the AT matrix should be weighted, you still want predominately your choosen keyword to be text.
December 18th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
[…] Getting the Most out Of Your Anchor Text: It’s not as Simple as you Think […]
December 18th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
@StumbleUpon Exchange:
Predominant might be pushing it. I favor a 50/50 ratio. But then again, I also have more link dropping resources than a lot of people, and have to worry more about setting of automatic filters.
December 18th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Good rundown Shady. I’ve been using a percentile matrix system for a while and have to agree on around a 50/50 ratio on the primary target terms.
However it is much more complicated than just numbers. Building a system that scores the quality of each inbound and weighing that score as well is necessary to target correctly. And that’s not a tool that’s just floating around (I’m sure you’ve got yours as I’ve got mine).
With the bulk tactic, you are correct about steering clear of the auto filters. I’ve had a lot of work go down the tubes by being too aggressive on one phrase.
December 18th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Just to be on the same page as you guys, when you say varying anchor text you doing this when your ASKING for a link through emailing or when you do submissions to directories/websites right? of course doing this fro your content and title tags will also help.
What other way would this help you?
December 18th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
@Jaan
No, not so much when you ask for links. Honestly, I never ask for them. I make my own. This does apply for directories though. But any blog comments you do, message board link drops, social news submitting, anything like that. Wherever you have the control. It opens up a lot of longtail terms you couldn’tve gotten before, and resists the google auto-filters.
December 18th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
If you’re looking at
white hatgray methods, then when we’re buying links the control to manipulate the anchor text is still there.We’re also talking about very dark gray things like dumping thousands at a time. When someone just gives you a link, smile and say… Huzzah!
December 18th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
@Shady:
It is out forever but you would be amazed how few use it and how few mention it publicly. Ken Giddens talked about this in one of his presentations.
It’s one of those simple techniques that, if you can’t figure out for urself, you don’t diserve to use it, as the impact is too big for the little league.
This seems like very simple and easy … and it is … but it’s effects are BIG and it’s the effects why one should not talk about this as it may be just the right push to get his competitors head.
If all BH used this method on linkspamming their link quality would grow … enough to maybe outrank your BH sites.
This is my problem.
Not only do they have XRummer right now, but they get smart tips on how to make link text. Sa any noob can become a successfull blackhat with not skill and competition grows exponentially.
But maybe I’m just paranoid!
December 19th, 2007 at 3:08 am
function macroIt($line) {
return preg_replace(’#\{([^\}]+)\}#se’,'getRnd(”$1″)’, $line);
}
function getRnd($str) {
$opt=explode(’,', $str);
return $opt[array_rand($opt)];
}
now.. doesn’t that look much better?
thanks, you have a great blog.. i learned here a lot
December 19th, 2007 at 11:17 am
@eXecute:
But I love my explode()!
heh. I’m working on the regular expressions, and thanks to 5ubliminal doing quite well, but they’re not a strong point yet. Thanks for the revision though, and glad you enjoy the blog! Keep on commenting
December 19th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
[…] Getting the Most out Of Your Anchor Text: It’s not as Simple as you Think […]
December 21st, 2007 at 9:52 am
Nice code sample.
I’m building a site that encourages visitors to put a widget on their site, and I’m going to use something like this to fuzz the anchor text that points back to my site.
I’m probably going to seed the random number generator with their IP address or cookie. I want the same person to see the same text, at least in the short term, so they don’t think anything funny is going on, but I want different people to see different things. If it works right 90% of the time I’ll be delighted.
I’m also thinking about fuzzing internal links and ‘blah blah blah’ text — this is a strange practice so it might get flagged, but it may really help at longtail ranking and avoiding duplicate detection.
December 21st, 2007 at 11:05 am
Good idea. I do variations on that with my sites. I’d reccomend hashing the week of the year+the IP address, converting that to an integer, and using that as a seed. That way, the content for any given IP will change every week, but not every page load.
December 21st, 2007 at 12:43 pm
[…] been pumping out great shit. Just this week we have slipping new sites past Matt Cutts and using anchor text like you’re supposed to. The anchor text post was great. I’ve been using those techniques for a long time but he put […]
December 27th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
“slipping new sites past Matt Cutts” That should not be hard to do. The Man ate too much Spam and sleepy..:)
Matt Cutts Spam Man
January 6th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
[…] vary your anchor text. Especially if you’re getting links very very quickly. “Organic” link growth will […]
January 13th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Dude - your site is my new favourite, starting to see your stuff all over the place, nice work.
How they hell do you manage to retain so much information? Whats your secret?
I have enough trouble remembering what I did yesterday X-)
Keep it coming!
January 13th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
@Aidan: Glad to hear ya like it, and glad you’re seeing it places!
And honestly, I have no idea how I retain what I do. I can’t remember a face or a name to save the life of me, but for whatever reason I’m good at remember how sites are promoted, and what the positive/negative affects have been.
and I’ll be sure to keep it coming
January 15th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Dude - you definitely have found your natural talents, and your only 19? Frick-in-heck!
Cheers
January 28th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Very good tips. As you can see, it also works if you use your anchor text as your name when you comment on blogs…then the website you enter will be attached to that anchor text. Lot of people don’t use this trick.
February 11th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Free Golf…
I think many people feel you should add a comment for the value of the comment not for your “tricky” text link to your site.
Oh and nice post Shady.
March 15th, 2008 at 4:44 am
This is a goldmine! Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Shady.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:12 am
[…] Anchor text should vary. For one, it will help you rank for a bigger variety of key phrases. For another, if you don’t vary your anchor text, you could end up like John Chow. […]
July 8th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
[…] Differentiate yourself with greater variety by using n grams (for the more competitive work) and/or anchor text matrices (for you lazy bastards who can’t be bothered to find out what an n gram is until you’re […]
August 10th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Hello,
Thanks for the info.. just a small newbie question please:
If i want to use “Alliance leveling guide” and “Alliance Power Leveling Guide” as anchor text… will the second one be inclusive of the first one so that there is no need to use the first one as an anchor text? or i have to do both separately?
Regards
August 12th, 2008 at 11:21 am
[…] the anchor text stuff: Getting the Most out Of Your Anchor Text: It’s not as Simple as you Think : Slightly Shady SEO For the rest, updating content is golden. It’s easier to index, easier to rank(albeit for a short […]
August 21st, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Nice one Shady. Directed here via a reference at Wicked; not sure how I missed this old post.