Anchor Text Effectiveness: What’s Best for Link-Building?

A month ago, James Gate of UK-based Skyrocket SEO conducted an interesting experiment on the effect of anchor text on external credibility or link-building. The purpose of the test was to understand how Google ranks pages with different kinds of anchor text pointing to the website. The test aims to clarify what the ideal make-up of your anchor text should be to rank most effectively within Google (as he notes, this experiment was limited to Google, so these results may not be applicable to the Bing algorithm which powers Bing and Yahoo!).

James dutifully sets up the parameters for the test, chooses the target keyword for the test, and creates a set of 10 links pointing to each of the following websites.  

• Bluesweets.com: Added 10 links with “learn more”, “read this” and other vague phrases as the anchor text.
• Purplesweets.com: Added 10 links with the exact match anchor text.
• Yellowsweets.com: Added 10 links with some exact match and some random related terms as the anchor text.

James found that while the Bluesweets.com domain ranked first, these rankings were quickly lost. Purplesweets.com gained the most rankings initially, but lowered once Google had more time to analyze the link profile of the page. Lastly, Yellowsweets.com performed the best in the long-run. While this page indexed last, it held the #1 spot for the target keyphrase.

So what’s the key takeaway? Don’t go crazy over the anchor text of your links. Yes, having a few target keyphrases in the anchor text will help you, but think about it from Google’s perspective. They want pages which are organically linked to because of the content, and if all your anchor text is perfect, that may throw a signal that something spammy is going on. To learn more about anchor text, link-building services, and how you can leverage this knowledge for your own company, contact Verndale’s SEO experts.