Does Google Think You’re a Dirty Rotten Spammer? (Hint: anchor text matters)

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Ok, listen up people…

I have something really important to say:

Stop effing up your anchor text.

Please, stop it.

Yes, I know we all love (luv) links back from your blog.

Yes, it is a favor and it does bleed you a little Google Juice every link.

And yes, your anchor text will help rank that link for those keywords.

Wait.

Stop.

Do you really understand that last claim?

Honestly, from what I see, you probably don’t.

Most people have no clue about anchor text.

I see it all the time.

Anchor text rules

Here’s the RULE: Anchor text should have 2-5 keywords/phrase for the link.

When you’re not sure how to anchor your link, here’s your procedure:

1. You want to link to someone. Excellent!
2. ASK them for their preferred keywords or phrases.
3. Use what they tell you for your anchor text linking to their article.

Otherwise, you might as well use “Click here.”

Because the alternative is worse: you anchor phrases against the keywords in the article. Dude, that’s what link spammers do! You don’t want to Google to think your friends are link spammers, do you?

(Exceptions: If you link an article by it’s title, it’s ok to anchor the whole title. Lazy, but ok. If you’re pranking, let’s talk.)

Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to figure out appropriate anchor text on your own.

Here’s a hypothetical example.

Suppose your friend writes an article about how nasty bad spammers and the evilness of black hat SEO techniques. Then, your perfectly well-meaning self comes along. You love this article. You want to love (luv) it with links. So you anchor the link with “my friend’s great article.”

Nice.

Now the search is going to attempt to associate “friend’s great article” with evil black hat SEO. That doesn’t really compute. Further, it won’t help drive your qualified readers down that link.

Sure, your friends are the coolest. Everyone already knows that. But if they have a need for specific information about black hat SEO, they’re going to find out by accident, not because you alerted them via keyword-anchored link.

Ok, now that I’ve stirred it all up, here’s more unpleasantry:

1. Linking is NOT easy. I’ve written on this before: the search engine IS part of your audience. If you only write for yourself and human readers, you’re shortchanging yourself long term.
2. Your rants will be quickly forgotten by readers and by search engines. Unless your rant is long enough and has enough of a point to carry meaningful keyword phrases, it’s going to be hard get it ranked in search engines. And that kind of stinks because rants are fun and easy to write.

   Conversely, crap like how to implement register_activation_hook in WordPress plugins is hard to write (because it has to be accurate and precise) and won’t do much for your current readers… but it’s easy to anchor and brings in search traffic like crazy in the long term.

Now I can see the smoke pouring out your ears. The gears have seized up, the oil is burning, you have dozens or hundreds of blog posts full of crappy backlinks.

Bummer.

But wait! There’s hope.

See, I’m running this little month-long program starting around the first of May. It’s called the Blog Maintenance Challenge. And one of the Challenges is unscrewing your anchor text. You’re going to choose a couple of your flagship blog posts or pages, and you’re going to fix your links to them. And if you don’t have any links to them (shame), you’re going to learn how to do it right.

Then you’re going to fix your links from your articles to all your nice friend’s articles, so that Google doesn’t think you’re all a bunch of Dirty Rotten Spammers.

That’s doing link luvin’ right!

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