Anchor Text Manipulation

Anchor Text Variation

When websites aggressively build exact match anchor text links, a Google spam filter is triggered. It is unnatural for web pages that link to your website to all have exact match anchor text. A bit of anchor text variation is natural, just like how a great portion of the internet’s links are naked URLs.

Anchor Text Manipulation

As a result of being a search engine signal for relevancy, it is possible to over-optimize your links’ anchor text. Remember, anchor text is an editable element, you can create anchor elements and edit them in the future.

Targeted Anchor Text

Linkbuilders, or SEOs specialized in building links to a website, often control the anchor text from the links they build from other websites. These anchor texts are targeted – the keywords in the anchor text will match the targeted keyword of the page an SEO is trying to rank on.

Backlink Anchor Text

A backlink is a link from another website. The backlink anchor text is the anchor text used by other websites linking to your website. The anchor text of these backlinks help search engines determine the most relevant keywords a web page should rank for.

One-Way Anchor Text Backlinks

If website A links to website B with an anchor text backlink and website B does not link back to website A, then you have a one-way anchor text backlink. One-way anchor text backlinks are sought out by SEOs because PageRank juice flows from one domain to another. It is believed that the more one-way anchor text backlinks a web page has from websites with high PageRank, the better they will rank on search engines.

Excessive Anchor Text

Just like keyword stuffing, you can have too much anchor text on a given page. When there are too many keywords on a page linking to too many other pages of a website, or all to the same page but with different anchor texts, you have a case of excessive anchor text. The excessive use of anchor text within your website can lead to Google penalties as it is considered a spammy, user-unfriendly practice.

Anchor Text Distribution

Because link builders are actively building links to their website with targeted anchor text, particular keywords will have a higher share of a page’s overall anchor text distribution.

Spammy Anchor Text

A spammy anchor text is a link with an anchor text that has no relationship to the page it exists on or the page it is linking to. Spammy anchor texts are a common black hat SEO tactics to either temporarily rank for competitive keywords such as “pay day loans” or “buy viagra” but can also be used as a tool to harm a competitor’s website or individual through negative SEO and Google bombing.

Adjusting The Suggested Anchor Text.

Link Whisper allows you to change the anchor text for all suggestions that it provides you. You can change which words are selected in the existing sentence, and you’re able to make edits to the sentence right in the suggestions panel.

To demonstrate how the anchor text selecting works, I’ll be using the suggestion shown in the image below.

Selecting different words from the existing text.

Selecting different words to use in the anchor is just as easy as clicking on them. If you click on a word that isn’t part of the currently suggested anchor, Link Whisper will select the word.

If the word you click is a few words past the current end of the anchor text, Link Whisper will automatically select the words between the end of the anchor text as well as the word you clicked on.

Removing words from the suggested anchor

You can remove words from the suggested anchor text by clicking on them.

Quick selection of a single word

If you want to select a single word in the sentence text quickly, double-click it. Link Whisper will deselect all the other words in the sentence text and will select the one you double-clicked on.

You can still select other words after double-clicking a single word. Double-clicking can help you quickly change the entire anchor text selection if you want to.

Editing the sentence text

If the sentence text needs an edit to match the suggested link more closely, Link Whisper provides the option to edit the sentence text right in the Suggested Links panel.

Clicking on the “Edit Sentence” button will open up a small editor that will allow you to edit the sentence.

You can edit all of the words in the sentence text, including the suggested anchor’s words.

Clicking the “Save” button will save the changes to the sentence and close the editor.

The words in the sentence are still selectable, so you can still change the suggested anchor text by clicking on a word.

One thing to note, the edit to the sentence hasn’t been saved to the post yet, so if you scroll up the post, you’ll see that the post text hasn’t been changed yet. This is because the text edit is part of the link suggestions, so Link Whisper will wait until you approve the suggestion before editing the content and including the link.