If you’ve been hit by Panda or Penguin you’ll certainly know about it. I don’t know anyone in internet marketing who hasn’t been hit to some extent. However slowly the mist is fading and the reality of how to repair the damage is becoming clearer.
Unfortunately for anyone who has a successful site which has been actively promoted over the years it’s probably going to take a while to fix. For years many of us have been building links to our websites with a targeted anchor text. We did it because it worked, brought us traffic and customers however Google never did like it and classed it as gaming the system.
So all these web sites which ranked due to large number of links with specific anchor text have been penalised. There’s been a lot of debate on the relative percentages but the consensus seems to be as follows –
- 30% of targeted keywords (e.g make money online)
- 40% of branded links (e.g. just plain url like www.googlefix.com)
- 30% of Untargeted keyword (e.g click here, visit here, try this site)
There’s no doubt that the dangerous one is targeted keywords – to be honest I’d keep the percentages lower than that and always vary them. If you have an important links use your keywords in them and vary all the others.
The other thing that is important is that there seems to be some level of links where the Penguin changes kick off. So if you have a newer site it may seem to be ok but the filter might hit you at any point. Check the percentages of your links you can use services like SEOMoz or Market Samurai now has a anchor text analysis module built in too.
The ratio seems to operate on a per domain basis – for example if you have 1000 links from one site with duplicate anchor text then only one will count for the assessment.
Check those Links !!!
If you are affected then start building ordinary links to fix your ratios. You can rescue sites that have been affected however it obviously can be hard work. This site itself was previously affected due to over optimization of the anchor text – “SEO marketing”, currently it’s back to page one for that term after being kicked out of top 100.
Good Luck ..