Anchor Text Algorithm Change?

Working for a search engine optimization company allows for me to stay on top of the changes in Google’s algorithm. Recently we noticed a huge transition of websites ranking results and began to analyze why the change was occurring.  Please leave a comment if you have noticed similar changes with your website.

As stated quite a few of the websites that we track have had altered SERP rankings quite recently and we knew that it wasn’t as a result of being banned from the results but simply a change in the algorithm. The commonality between all the sites? Anchor text links for the given keyword. The websites in question were part of a trial SEO activity that relied heavily on ‘anchor text’ incoming links. Especially for competitive search terms.

Anchor Text Google Flaw?

Was anchor text significance a flaw in Google’s algorithm? Well in short, somewhat. Google is king of natural results, what I mean by that is that they want to present the most relevant and natural website results as possible. As such they don’t want variables that will create spam techniques to create results for a given search term. Let’s take a look at the term ‘insurance’ or ‘loans’. Obviously if a website has thousands or millions of incoming links with the term ‘insurance’ it doesn’t mean that the given website is a credible source for that information. It just means that they have a very large budget for purchasing incoming links for that given term. That is obviously completely un-natural and against the general Google philosophy. A normal incoming link would simply have the given company name, or possible the company name and the word loan. Although how many people would simply link the term ‘loan’ to a given website? Not very many.

Staying Ahead of Google

Obviously everyones goal is to stay ahead of the Google algorithm. Changing constantly to mesh with the given algorithm and have outstanding SERPs results. A little trick is changing up the given anchor text that you are achieving for. Don’t have all incoming links with a keyword of ‘loans’, rather change it up where possible. If you are paying for links create your anchor text for your main keyword 60% of the time and change up the remaining 40%. For example 60% of your incoming links could have your main keyword ‘loans’ and the remaining 40% could be distributed with ‘company name loans’ or just your ‘company name’, or the type of loan you can provide such as ‘mortgage loans’ or even the area that you are trying to target. The point is to make things appear natural, and by having over 90% of your incoming links with a single given anchor text you can bet that it wasn’t a natural way of achieving links.

[tags]anchor text link help, anchor text changes algorithm, google algorithm changes anchor text[/tags]