Just got a brutal reality check on anchor text diversity

Last month a guy in the SEO Facebook group pulled apart my backlink profile. He said I had 40 links all with 'best coffee maker' as the anchor text. I thought that was good for ranking but he told me it looks totally unnatural now. So I went back and changed half of those to branded anchors and naked URLs. Has anyone else had to redo their whole anchor strategy after getting feedback like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_kevin12d ago

Agreed completely, I had to fix the exact same problem with my own sites after a harsh audit too.

kelly_nelson9512d ago

Man, I went through the exact same thing with a few of my old sites. I had all these exact match anchors thinking I was being smart about SEO, then an audit showed I looked like a total spam bot. It was a nightmare to go back and clean everything up, had to change hundreds of links. Such a relief to catch it before a penalty hit though. Did your audit catch anything else that surprised you?

the_zara12d ago

Read somewhere that Google's Penguin update basically made exact match anchors a red flag for spam. The safer play now is to mix it up with branded terms, generic phrases, and even the occasional misspelled URL. Sounds like catching that feedback early saved you from a future penalty.