Since the release of Penguin 2.0, many sites have taken a dive in the SERPs. One of the causes of poor SERP performance is an excess of anchor text containing specific keywords.
In the past, a primary goal of link building was to gain many incoming links. These links often used anchor text with keywords relevant to a site’s SEO strategy. However, in recent years, Google has focused on the characteristics of natural link growth. They now penalize sites whose backlink profiles appear to have been artificially created by SEOs.
High quality sites tend to gather links with a diverse range of anchor text. Most people who link to websites are not trying to help a site’s SEO strategy. They usually don’t include keywords in the anchor text. Instead, they use the site’s name, brand name, the author’s name, or the topic of the page. They also use generic words like “article,” “said,” or “here.”
If 80% of a site’s incoming links have anchor text full of keywords, especially if those keywords are the same, Google’s algorithms will notice. They will consider the site heavily optimized. Thus, they will decide the link profile doesn’t truly show the site’s quality. This will lead to those links being devalued and a drop in the site’s position in search results.
This was once a common and effective SEO strategy. Less skilled SEOs still use it. Therefore, it’s very likely that a site using this strategy will see its position in search results drop. This will happen relative to competitors with less “optimized” link profiles. So, what can be done to mitigate the effects?
Ask Webmasters To Remove Keyword Anchor Text
The first step to remove links is to contact the site. Ask them to take down the problematic link. You could ask webmasters to change the anchor text. However, they likely won’t want to spend much time on tasks that don’t benefit their site. So, asking them to delete the link entirely has a better chance of success.
Disavow The Links
Asking to have links removed is the optimal solution unless either the webmaster in question is unwilling or unable to comply, or there are so many keyword anchor text links from many different domains that it’s not possible to have them removed in a reasonable timeframe.
Google provides a tool for disavowing links that will stop the search engine algorithms from taking them into account at all. While Google will consider the use of this tool a strong suggestion not to take links into account, it reserves the right to ignore that suggestion. Therefore, making a concerted effort to have offending links removed altogether is by far the best option.
Going forward, SEOs and site owners will need to exercise more caution about how they distribute anchor text in their link building efforts.
