Comments on: SEO Case Study: Link Building – natural anchor text – PR0 vs. PR4 strength

By: Move Ahead Media Bangkok

Move Ahead Media Bangkok — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:03:42 +0000

I still think that PR, to a degree plays a part. But as always there is more than 1 way to skin a cat. Different links, blogs, press releases, social media etc. A wide array will help you rank

By: seo consultancy

seo consultancy — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:02:49 +0000

ive suspected for a long time that PR links havnt been that important and ive found that having more links from as many different websites/domains to be more effective that high PR links

By: Move Ahead Media Australia

Move Ahead Media Australia — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:09:40 +0000

Varying anchor texts is very important along with just having your company name or simple URL instead of an anchor. If genuine people were linking to you, would they always but your keyword? Probably not, so try varying it which will help. About PR, there are so many factors to take into consideration which are now classed as more important than PR.

By: Madbid

Madbid — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 22:27:39 +0000

Actual real life examples like this into how page rank and anchor text works are fantastic. Far more interesting to see this rather than read rumours and heresay

By: Fireworks

Fireworks — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:34:48 +0000

I’m not so sure of PR in this day and age but it’s still a ranking factor in terms of rankings and link building

By: leap

leap — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:16:52 +0000

Hi Fred!

Sorry to hear you’re having troubles with your Link Building Campaign!

To address your questions:

1) If you change all your new links, you have a serious footprint problem. Google sees that after you dropped, you changed the anchor texts of some links and knows exactly which links you bought. You still might want to do this, but only for a very small number. It’s better to focus on new link building with anchor texts that compare better to your competition.

2) Which answers the second question: There is no one correct proportion of links. This is different from topic to topic, actually even from keyword to keyword. The best proportion is the one that’s being used by the top competitors for your keyword. Use a tool like our Link Research Tools to look at the anchor text and link status proportions of your competitors and try to emulate them.

Kind regards,
Christoph

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 09:23:57 +0000

This was extremely helpful. I believe we tripped an anchor text filter ourselves on one of our pages. We consistently ranked #s 3-6 for the main phrase (single and plural) – think “Red Widget” and “Red Widgets” then all of the sudden after some link building we fall to #s 17 and 22, when for more than a year we’ve been at at least #10 for the plural term.

In our case, it does not appear that this is necessarily a “-30″ filter… but it is definitely a filter. We have more back links from relevant sites than the competition.. but we have consistently used similar anchor text.

Any thoughts on whether Google just devalues the links coming in from the identical anchor-text sites? E.g. – just stops counting those links? Our link profile probably has 90% same link text, 10% varied. It appears as though the 10% might still be getting counted as we didn’t drop a normal “penalty amount” of 30, 100 or worse.

I have some questions that I’d love if you could address:

1) We have influence over some of the links we’ve gotten to this page. Would it be wise to go back to those web masters and ask them to slightly vary the link text in the existing links?

2) What specific proportion of links do you recommend for healthy link building? Should we be targeting 50% exact match? Less/more? I know this isn’t an exact science but I’m looking for more of what the rule of thumb is here.

3) Have you had any similar experiences since posting this video? I know this vid is a bit old and I’m curious if you’ve had other encounters.

Thanks,
Fred

By: Jan

Jan — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 09:11:15 +0000

Like a good Cocktail, just the right mix makes it perfect. Many SEOs forgot to fill up the backlink pool with “real organic” links like “Homepage”, a full phrase or the brand.

Thanks for this good case study!

By: Hermes

Hermes — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:17:31 +0000

I was having very hard time with a ripoffreport.com page ranking 2nd under a client’s site for his own brand name.

After reading your post, I pushed it to the 5th page and it took around 60 days after the links were created.

I think it work only with competitive KWs and the links created need to be CLEARLY spammed

By: Pay on Results SEO

Pay on Results SEO — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 04:45:49 +0000

PR doesn’t really matter too much in this day and age. PR0 links do work and get top rankings. A variety of different links creates a natural link profile which is critical in a link profile