So, some SEO talk, let’s do it!
Let’s be honest, everyone is way too excited about anchor text links. Everyone’s all like – “Yeah, I got exact match anchor text links, I’m cool” – the fact is, you’re not cool. So, the point of this post is to show you that anchor text isn’t everything. It’s more about where that link is coming from, regardless of what it says!
Anchor Text
Informs the search engine of a links destination topic – Helps a website rank for that particular query.
Domain Authority
Authority which is passed from one site to another, regardless of the anchor text – Helps a website become more “authoritative” (powerful basically).
Theory
See, now my theory is…it doesn’t matter how many anchor text links you have, if you don’t have any “Authoritative” websites/domains pointing to your website, you will never, ever, ever, ever rank for a competitive search query.
Anchor text within a link only informs a search engine for what the destination is! Just because 1,000 sites say a website is about “car insurance” it doesn’t mean it’s true; what if all the incoming links are from spam ridden sites? It all counts for nothing!
Personal Example
Back at my first agency Greenlight Search, we really struggled to gain good rankings for certain terms, for a particular client. Now, I wouldn’t say that we had a bad strategy though it wasn’t great either for this project. What I quickly realised was the websites continuously outranking our clients website were authoritative within the industry; for example with regards to Gadgets and Tech, Mashable.com, Techcrunch, Engadget etc…
After some backlink analysis – “Hmmm, not one link to their site/page containing the relevant anchor text”
So, sure, they didn’t have any anchor text links; why are they ranking for that search query and others alike? They have countless links from other highly authoritative websites in the industry and Google knows when website “x” says something about product “y” – it’s a credible source of information and ranks it highly.
To be noted: There were SEO elements helping these websites too; optimised titles, header tags and text content also played a significant part.
So, What Next?
I’m not going to turn this into a link building post now – as much as I’d love to – however, a basic example would be to remember that when link building, it is better to acquire a link from the BBC website displaying “http://www.website.com/” over “Optimised Anchor Text” from any Joe-random website.
Spend time and put the effort in. Cheap, quick, accelerated anchor text tactics don’t work too well.
Don’t get me wrong though, relevant anchor text links are useful, but the quality of them is more important!
