Links and Offsite SEO is only one part of the puzzle. You need to make sure that you have quality content, your Onsite SEO is on point, and your technical SEO is good as well.

Sure.  They don’t fit another category.

I’m primarily referring to external. However, using a variety of target keyword and longtail anchors instead of just the exact same anchor over and over, is a good practice with internal linking as well.

In general, there is no huge advantage whether you have /blog/ or /magazine/ in your URL, unless you are specifically trying to rank for those kinds of keywords eg. “[niche] blog” or “[niche] magazine”

For example, if the content was high quality, would it be best to designate the WP site at mydomain.com/article/articlename or /magazine/articlename?

Or does Google like /blog/ best–or does it not matter at all? Thanks Matt!

For internal you don’t need to bother with Branded anchor text. 20% Miscellaneous and %80 Target is a good ratio for internal anchor text. I only bother with Branded anchor text when doing external anchor text optimization.

How can we use branded anchor in internal linking for our money pages. An example please…

Great question Justin.

Let’s say you want to rank for “Best Golf Clubs”

An example of an EMD would be bestgolfclubs.com

In this example, the main keyword that the site wants to rank for is “Best Golf Clubs”. This keyword is not something exclusive to this domain. It is an existing search term, AND has the intent of people looking for golf club recommendations.

“Golf Genius” is likely not a common search term – particularly if the business is new. The search intent for those searching for “Golf Genius” is so they can find that specific company.

Just like you would type in “Diggity Marketing” to find this site…You are searching for the company. There is no other search intent behind “Diggity Marketing” except for people looking for this site.

So bringing it back to anchor text…

In the example above, let’s say my website is Golfgenius.com. If I have the anchor text “Golf Genius” – that would be classed as Branded Anchor text. If I have the anchor text “Best Golf Clubs” linked to Golfgenius.com, that would be exact match anchor text.

If you had an EMD site. Eg bestgolfclubs.com then I would still treat the anchor text “Best Gold Clubs” as exact match anchor text, and not branded anchor text.

If you need more Brand/URL anchors in your anchor text ratio, I would lean towards using more URL anchors instead.

I apologize in advance for the length of this. I actually shortened it…drastically. lol

Having just read this article, there’s a description you’ve provided that I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around. I’m assuming I must not be grasping the concept correctly.

You wrote the following:

******************************

“… a branded anchor for golfgenius.com would be “Golf Genius”.

Branded anchors only apply to non-EMD/PMD sites…”

******************************

As per a quick Google search:

“Exact match domains (EMDs) are domain names that incorporate the exact keywords that you are trying to rank for in Google’s SERPs.”

“Golf Genius” appears to be an “exactly-matching” anchor of the EMD website: “golfgenius.com” , no?

Again, you stated that:
“Branded anchors only apply to non-EMD/PMD sites.”

Does that indicate that -by definition- the site owner must technically NOT be attempting to rank for “Golf Genius” ?

What then determines if a particular word or phrase is indeed a Brand and NOT a keyword, or vice versa? And does one carry additional value over the other?

An example would be the athletic shoe and clothing company, Nike.

Their brand is called “Nike” and their domain is “Nike.com” .

Are they not an “EMD” ?
I would infer that they certainly are. I would have to assume that there would be a lot of competition for the keyword “Nike” from many other companies/websites; for example from footlocker.com etc.

They “SHOULD” -I would suppose-want to rank highly for that word, I’m sure that many people search quite specifically for “Nike” on Google.

I’m inferring that their website contains “nike” as anchor text that links back to “nike.com”

Is it then a brand anchor? Is it not an EMD?

I apologize for the length of the question.

I was trying to be thorough in my explanation by providing examples, because I understand it’s unlikely that I am yet to have acquired and possess the vocabulary (and of acronyms) required to explain my thought process adequately.

And I thank you again.

Sincerely and respectfully,

Justin

They get indexed, for sure, but I have no idea how much “weight” they deliver. Impossible to test.

Build links to the inner page, but check out my “Black Sheep” article first.

Thanks,

You want your backlink profile to look natural. DiggityMarketing.com has nearly 1000 referring domains at the time of this writing. Perhaps 30% of those are URL anchors. So 300 of them. What are the chances that all 300 of them look exactly like https://www.diggitymarketing.com?

Or we must use all types on backlinks?

By the way I also have one more question. There are some sites ranking for a few main keywords and they receive the backlinks for exact anchors. Do you think the most competitive keyword must take the biggest percentage of backlinks compared to low competitive ones? Thanks

You get broad-level benefit.

Does anchor text help only with exact keywords mentioned in anchor or is the effect more broad?

For example:

Let’s say you want to rank for “product X review” and you get a backlink with an anchor “product X”

Does that anchor helps only with ranking for “product X” keyword, or does it push ranking for all phrases that belong to the product X’s corpus of keywords.

Thanks for your reply and feel free to be brief with your response as i know you must be extremely busy.

Cheers!

Foreign SERPs are a different story.

As a rule of thumb, I think it’s as effective as ever.

Is the internal anchor text ratio: 50% EMA – 25% URL/Brand – 25% Misc still what you use today?

Jeff

Compare yourself to other EMDs.

Sounds like a big opportunity. If they’re not truly optimized for SEO, then its easy to wiggle in. But back to your question, topical.

Would you consider this as being ‘topical’ or just NA as it’s kind of random?

This article strictly covers anchor text. I suggest checking out this article on pillowing.

Each referring domain will count as one anchor.

Yes I am. It definitely works.

Thanks

AnchorCycling = Pillow Anchor?

Cheers

1) Exact/Partial match domain
2) Yep

“50% Brand/URL anchors
For example, a branded anchor for golfgenius.com would be “Golf Genius”. Branded anchors only apply to non-EMD/PMD sites.
URL anchors are variations of the naked URL: golfgenius.com, http://golfgenius.com, http://www.golfgenius.com, etc”

#1) What does EMD/PMD sites mean.
#2) I am looking to rank varying pages on my career coaching website.
https://www.mattdonatelle.com/
Does this mean I would keep using the branded anchor of “matt donatelle” over and over again based on the example you gave for golf genius?

Thank you much

Thanks, homie.

Thank you very much for this helpful info for what I have been in confusion.

I’ve got 45 PBN’s that I’ve launched at a site and it still hugs the 2nd page – I’ve literally got Gumtree (which is like Craiglist) higher and I’m like “Wth” – I’m going to check out the anchor text distribution.

To be honest all I do is

[niche] [city] [sububr]

and then just alter the suburb across all my PBNs’ – I’ve been doing some naked and brand anchors and then also sending some local citation links but yeh getting more creative may do the trick rather than more PBNs who knows.

10-15% or so.

Assuming the target anchors niche average is 20%, what % would you go for?

Yep, you can. Just make sure to supplement with some links from German language sites. Citations help.

A really nice insights about backlinks.

I have a German e-commerce site and it is really hard to get backlinks from German sites. Is it okay if i get some links from English written sites, lets say some naked URLs or branded URL-s to home page ? Or is it just a waste of time and money?

Thanks in advance!

I love ABC 🙂

If your onsite is on-point and you’re #1, then backlinks is usually the solution. You can earn a backlink the same day as something is posted.

Thank you

Still works. I do it all the time.

It doesn’t seem to fit to the overall idea of this technique.

Sure. Everything gets tabulated.

Absolutely.

I’ve seen 60% EMA before and they tanked.

If you still see people ranking with anchors like that, they probably have a good chunk of them disavowed.

I have found that my main competition is sitting around 50% exact match backlink. can this be true?!

Do the math… how many links would it take to dilute a webpage with 20 target anchors (100%) if you need to get that down to 10%?

Yes and no.

Thanks so much for the content.
(I think my last comment didn’t get posted…).
when using LSI anchors rather than the target keyword, would you categorize those as topic anchors ?

Also, (might be a stupid question) but for this analysis we only use dofollow links right ?

What if it’s a new site and someone got their anchor ratios wrong.

Is it ok to dilute the anchors, with the relevant ones that they missed like branded and generic and how fast can one dilute?

Based on tests, they only significantly move the needle when its what your anchor text profile needed for balance.

Great post! So would you say that URL and branded anchors move the needle at all? Or do they just not move it as much as target anchors?

You need to optimize for each URL.

Thanks for your reply Matt.

So, I have another one

Lets say we built a lot of targeting anchors on our domain (we have around 100) and the profile percentage for anchors is 80% ?? Can we dilute these anchors to 10% by building more anchors by brand name, naked, naked + brand, LSI etc, or we must remove them ? most of those are pbn’s.

Seems like the competition has around 70 percent branded anchors on the domain.

Is this ratio for the whole domain or we have to optimize for each url ?

Would relevant blog comments hep in diluting this ratio or we should go for pbn’s ?

Thanks again !!

Your answer will make my day !!

Aah..okay now understood. Thanks matt for PBNDEF example 😀

Not quite. I mean delete links from PBNABC and create a new one with a better anchor on PBNDEF.

Really nice post about anchor text optimization in the post penguin/zebra world 😀

Want to understand this as you said “don’t change your anchor text on existing links, but instead delete links and replace them with new links using the anchor text that you want”

Please correct me if am wrong:

1. Delete all the links from ABC PBN
2. Put new link at ABC PBN but at different location of PBN
3. Example: Earlier i have placed link at the first paragraph at ABC PBN, now i have deleted and placed bottom of same post at ABC PBN

This is what you mean to say?

Thanks
Amrit

Referring domain count.

First of all you are a champion.

My question is: When I open AHREF anchors the percentage total (referring domains) is always >100 percent sometimes up to 200% why is that so ? and how to tackle it.

At the same time the percentage total for Anchor for referring pages is always 100 percent.

Which stat should I rely on the Anchor text percentage from referring pages or Anchor Text Percentage of referring domain ?

If your site doesn’t have external links, then the pages have no power. The most you’ll get from internal links is an anchor text. Which helps, but in a different way.

I’d go with the main keyword you want to rank. Gonna have to choose one, but usually, it will work out in favor of both.

Anchor analysis is done on a per page (topic) basis.

My site is a broader authority site, so not one main KW. Should I just look at the main competitors with similarly broad sites in the niche? Ie the ones who are doing really well overall

The key is that we’re looking for general guidance… not supreme accuracy.

When you pull anchors you only talk about ahrefs.

How about the other data that Majestic, Moz, SEM Rush and so on?

Surely you could get a more accurate anchor text profile ratio by factoring in everything from the top 5. Then averaging it all out.

Or is this more about just being congruent as doing what I suggested is over kill analysis paralysis and it makes things complex?

I’d put it under topic.

Correct on both points.

Quick question. I was doing some research on top 5 competitors for a client last night. I came across anchors like ‘london’ or ‘other city close to london’.

But lets assume the site wanted to rank for a city that was 100 km/miles away from london.

How the heck do you class this? I’m kind of lost… Misc? Still target but it’s really not.

What do you class it as?

Would it be right to say that if you are already on page one in the top 5 and looking to push to #1 then you need to take what ahrefs gives you and then factor in the links you built that are hiding on PBNs. Otherwise the over all percentages for the top 5 and distorter right?

Second. If the top 5 that you are running against are all PMDs or basically EMDs with a filler word so lets say EMDs for argument sake. And when you figured things out the target anchor text is 30% to 50% for the others in the top 5. And you are a brand. You can go harder on the target anchor text right? As a keyword in the URL hold heavy weight right? So if I have a clients site at about 27% and EMDs are at 50% for #1 and the others around 20% to 30%… Going harder is ok then right?

Tough to say… if they’re truly spammy and Google thinks so as well, then they’re already being ignored.

Rock on, brotha.

Correct.

Many links are ignored. That’s what Google does a lot more of now. They ignore a lot of links. If you’re sending garbage links for pillowing, then its quite possible your ratios are not what you thought.

Yes, I would consider that a target anchor.

With the tip on sending just the location or keyword without location. Eg “Plumber” or “New York” if the target is “Plumbers New York”. Would this be classed as a target Anchor?

“Plumber” is obvious, it’s target anchor. But I was thinking ‘New York” is Misc but then I thought “New York” is park of “Plumbers New York” so just a location anchor should fall into the Target % when you add it up.

Is this right?