Overheard a rep at a conference say anchor text ratios are overrated

Guy was talking about how he gets top rankings with mostly branded anchors and zero exact match spam. Made me rethink my whole link profile strategy after 3 years of obsessing over ratios. Anyone else ditch the old school anchor text rules?

3 comments

3 Comments

mark3611mo ago

Stopped me cold reading that. I spent four years building link profiles with strict ratios - 30% branded, 20% naked URLs, the whole spreadsheet routine. Had a client in the legal niche where I was terrified to touch anything but branded anchors for guest posts, and they still tanked after a Google update. Now I wonder if I was overthinking this the whole time while the actual ranking signals were elsewhere. Maybe those perfect ratios were just a comfortable myth we all bought into.

alexw751mo ago

Never heard someone say the whole ratio thing was a myth before, that's wild to read.

uma_johnson17d agoMost Upvoted

Perfect ratios were just a comfortable myth" - my friend spent months on that too before his site crashed.