Recommending some form of anchor text ratio percentages would likely do more harm than
good. Google’s link algos have gotten really good at detecting anchor text manipulation –
Through using algo improvements and some help from the disavow tool along the w ay, in my
opinion.
Instead of having an anchor text ratio, and idolizing things by specific pages, I recommend
you do an overall anchor text strategy to yes, rank a page, but not just focus on one specific
page ranking when there will (or at least, should) be a fair few pages (Including the
homepage/root authority) that’ll affect the outcome anyway.
Anchor text clouds and ratios provided by tools are not accurate:
They count every page on a website, for example, if you have a WordPress blog they’ll count
the author page, date pages, cat pages and every other page that link gets flagged up on.
This massively throws off the true anchor text ratio, and is the reason if you’re building new
sites I recommend you to track EVERY link you build and acquire/get natur ally so you can
work out your true anchor text ratios and see where it’d be a sensible move to fire a partial
or exact match anchor from a solid backlink.
Likewise, it also massively depends on where the link comes from what anchor you can “get
away with” using to the target page – Generally, the higher authority and relevancy of a site,
the higher keyword anchor focus you can use, especially if you power up that link and the
context is as relevant as possible
I’ve done keyword focused anchors from some of the biggest sites in the world and seen
huge ranking signal boosts, whilst doing the exact same strategy within the exact same
context but on much lower authority sites and it ends up hurting rankings.
The best way I can explain how to build advanced anchor text strategies is to forget it as it’s
own tactic and utilize it as a part of your entire link building campaign whilst also analysing
competitors and your own niche/SERPs averages.
SURROUNDING TEXT
One of the bigger things that people forget to take into consideration, and something Google
has confirmed is something they take into consideration – The text that surrounds your
anchor text.
My advice is just to make it as contextually relevant as possible. Your #1 focus should
always be the anchor itself, and trying to place it in the area that makes the most sense…
However you can also do some surrounding manipulation if you’re wanting to go after
additional keywords you don’t want to include in the anchor text, e.g.
–Have you seen these super cheap guest posts from DFY Links? Relevant, affordable and
fast!
I can have the keywords “cheap”, “relevant” and “affordable” whilst not having to do a
dodgier looking anchor.
ANALYSING YOUR SERPS ANCHOR TEXTS
As I said above, it’s really not a good idea to use the anchor text clouds/ratios tools provide
to get an idea of what your competitors anchors look like – That being said, for quick
overview, competitive analysis research it can be a super simple method.. Especially if the
page is in a lower competition SERP with fewer overall links.
The difference between my analysis and that of others is I tend to take it one step further. I
use a secondary tool (Either Screaming Frog, Website Auditor or Pulno) to get access to the
internal pages that are linking to our target page – Bear in mind if you’re trying to rank local
or your competitors are ranking a homepage, you cannot use this technique.
Screaming Frog allows you to very easily get an overview of the entire internal linking
campaign of a website via a crawl diagram that is easily filtered to the specific page you’re
trying to analyse – Again, not all that plausible if you’re competing vs 1m page sites, but
anything competitor that is under 20,000 pages and you should be good to go!
The crawl diagram gives you an easy to follow line diagram back to the pages that are
internally linking, as well as handy tooltip overviews of that page.
The tooltip allows you to make sure it’s a URL that is even worth your time.
As a side note, SF also has this very handy key that allows you to see if the pages are set
to index or noindex via it being either a green or red node in the diagram.
Once you have the internal links that your SEO intuition is telling you are related, then you
want to format all those URLs and run them through Ahrefs bulk tool
I then sort the internal linking pages by referring domains, this allows me to review each
page that actually has links – As well as look at other signals those pages may have like
traffic.
Once you have done all of that, you’ll be able to work out several things:
• 1
How many internal pages are linking back, and what sort of quality/relevancy? – This is a great way to
come up with your own content ideas or just plain steal competitors that you know is working.
• 2
What sort of anchor texts are being used across your competitors site – A great way to figure out what
sort of margins you can get away with, as long as your competitor is on a similar footing as your site.
• 3
How many and what type of backlinks your competitor is using – This is a great way to figure out how
many backlinks you’ll need to out-do them and what sort of cost it’ll be.
EXAMPLE ANCHOR TEXT STRATEGY
Whilst I can’t give you ratios and exacts, I can give you what I would do in a couple of
example scenarios.
Scenario – Fresh Affiliate Site, Med. Comp. Keywords
Okay, so in this scenario we’re going to be looking at a medium competition SERP with a
brand new domain in the affiliate space.
As it’s a brand new domain, every link signal we want to send to Google in itially needs to be
as relevant, authoritative or worthwhile as possible.
Firstly, I almost always start off by building out my foundational links via social profiles and
other link sources (Check out the Advanced Link Building section of this course for more
actual link ideas) that are all either auto-generated anchors from the site we’re getting the
link from or branded.
Once we have the site indexed and the initial branded links going live.. I’ll analyse to see
how many links (Both from the direct page and the internal pages) the top 5 competitors are
going for.
Let’s say I come up with a good, healthy number of 15 guest posts over month #2 (That I
allow to naturally index) – This gives me enough power to outrank the #1 spot AND isn’t too
high of a link count to jeopardize the site so early into its inception.
I have 5 internal supporting pages, 1 money page and my homepage – As it’s a new site, I
want to get the overall root authority up, so I’ll be building links at the homepage.
If you have an already existing site and you don’t feel your competitors root authority is
much, much higher than yours.. Then you don’t need to amp up the root authority of the
domain, just focus on the pages that’ll contribute to the ranking of the keyword.
I will split 10 of the guest posts at the supporting pages, 3 at the homepage and 2 direct at
the money page – Saving the 2 sites for the best quality links (And safest) I can get my
hands on.
The supporting pages can just be a mixture of anchor text related to the article title itself, the
brand name and the contents of the posts.
The homepage links are, obviously, just going to be straight branded AND if you’re a bit
paranoid about Google reviews, you can even format these guest posts into more
interview/contribution styles so that it makes more sense to link to the homepage.
The 2 money page anchors then would be a keyword variant (Not an exact, likely a partial
match that you’ve seen a competitor with but with a much stronger link) and a
keyword+brand variant – Not enough people use keywords within the branding, e.g. This
example I used in our link
This allows you to put context + branding into your keywords.
CONCLUSION
Hopefully the above gives you enough insight into how I go about anchor text strategies
going into 2020. There’s no real overall ratio strategy, it’s purely based on analysis and the
specific pages you’re building the links at..
