Power of Internal Anchor Text

JasonSc

JasonSc

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I know this might be a little SEO 101, but I think it might have value to some newer people.

We have a client which was not moving up in the SERPs. I kept adding and revising their landing page content, but no movement. Even with killer content on the internal pages, the homepage was ranking for all their terms. I spent sometime doing an audit and realized all the internal anchor text was jacked up.

Basically all of the anchor text was pointing at the home page or the contact us page. The anchor text was stuffed to hell and back.

I thought one my pervious employees had fixed the problem months ago, but I was wrong.

In late February, I spent a week going through all the blog post (200+) and revised the anchor text ratio and also pointed the links to the relevant landing page. I also converted the site to SSL. I took about 30 days for the site to get completely indexed with the https version.

It took about 2 weeks to start seeing some gains, but a little over 30 days this is where the site is.
Now the homepage does not rank and its the internal landing pages which rank.

The other interesting thing is over 95% of these blog post do not have any backlinks according to ahref and Google Search Counsel.

This is for a local business in a very competitive niche and a top 50 US metro area. We had 70 terms move up at least 10 spots or more.

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SO there was no internal linking in blog posts except to the HP? Ie the internal pages had no links to them whatsoever once they rolled off the homepage?
 
@Darth All the contextual links pointed to either the home page, contact page or a different blog post if it was a series (part 1, part 2)

The internal landing pages (head of the silo) had a few links (less then 10) pointing at them from the supporting page, but nothing of significance.

Darth said:
once they rolled off the homepage?
Click to expand...
For this vertical we do not do "recent post" on the home page. We try as best can to limit the number internal links on the home page so we can point the link juice to where its needed, silo head.
 
This makes me wonder if the links in the related posts section are a lost opportunity in SEO if they are constantly updated dynamically.
 
doublethinker said:
This makes me wonder if the links in the related posts section are a lost opportunity in SEO if they are constantly updated dynamically.
Click to expand...

Depends on your goal. From the case studies I have read (sorry can't find any right this minute) Google gives weight values to internal links depending on their location.

If I'm not mistaken importance from most to least:
  1. In context
  2. Main Navigation
  3. Sidebar
  4. Footer
The way I look at and describe it to clients is as follows: When linking from something on your homepage to an internal page you are telling Google that this is a very important page. In my niche, blog post are the least important pages. We have a link in the main nav bar, that is it.

Also, with local business sites, most of the links are pointing at the homepage because of citations and mentions in local news sources. So as far as the most powerful page, its typically the homepage. This is why we try and have links only to our money landers.

This article, a little dated has some good info.
 
@RomesFall and I just re-did the internal linking for a big client of ours and it's resulted in some pretty positive changes.

We jumped from #3 to #1 for a few keywords after changing the internal links to be more diverse - Prior they were using the same internal anchors across the site, often resulting in 20 - 30 of the same internal anchor and no diversity at all.
 
This is fantastic. It's something we all know but it's nice to see data to further reinforce it.

We know that page rank is diluted through every link on a page in various amounts and also dampened on each leap, so less and less makes it through each link. So to cycle it all back to the homepage and let it drip it's way back through the site is completely the wrong move. By the time it goes through a menu item, then through 10 posts and 1/11th goes through the pagination, there's almost none left for any pages on /page/2/ and beyond.
 
How has this shook out after... just under a month? Still climbing?
 
@Samwise89 The site is climbing for the most part, but I can't say the additional increases are strictly based on the anchor text. I found some additional issues with the site so more work, both on page and off page has been done.
 
Back when OpenSiteExplorer wasn't quite as much of a piece of garbage as it is now I did some fun little tests with this kind of thing.

Basically, I used their Page Authority metric to gauge link flow improvements and surprisingly it did correlate with ranking increases - at the time. What I learned was that reducing the link volume on any given page resulted in a PA increase.

I still try to manage link volume on a page today, and I also try to adhere by some basic rules of siloing, though not quite so much lately. I absolutely believe that link flow division is real and that you can sculpt it when done properly.

I also believe that you can use content to increase the amount of value any external inbound link will pass to your site. Essentially it's my opinion that there are certain factors that will cap the value of a link. So that tasty DR 55 link you paid $200 for might not mean shit...

Problem is I can't prove any of that as I don't know how they actually do it.

So for the most part I keep this shit to myself and adapt my approach based on what little I can figure out, or what I choose to believe.

It's far better to just take an approach to this kind of thing that allows you to work with the only certainty you have, and that is that every page starts with 100% of it's value / power and every page it links out to will only receive a portion of it.

We don't know how many points or percents link placement will shave off, and we don't know how surrounding content will positively or negatively affect it either.

If all else were equal we do however know that you can divide that whole number of 100 by the total volume of links on the page.

This gives you a very basic, inaccurate model to work from, but it's a model nonetheless.

So definitely always do that, and then adhere to best practices that you've come to believe to be best practices, and get back to promoting the fuck out of your content. There's not much need to over-complicate it, because you'll just never know.
 
Awesome insight Romesfall , I definitely have seen similar things happen to me. I did an SEO review of a site I work on earlier this year and found that it had tons of backlinks in the footer. Some of them went to big converting/higher search volume pages, and other ones went to a bunch of niche product pages. I removed all the niche pages and put them in a "learn more about our products" page. 2 weeks later and the higher search volume pages are now ranking in the top 3 for some seriously competitive keywords. Stuff we hadn't been able to crack into the top 3 for months, and now suddenly we just shoot up there?

Yeah, Google Fred could have helped, but I think that it was only part of the story.

So throw that into the anecdote pile if you'd like, but I really truly believe that the link siphoning is real as described.

And, at the end of the day - when a potential customer comes to your page, don't you want them to just go to the pages that you want them to go to? Why use a bunch of extraneous links on there that increase the journey or could even put them off the path entirely? It all comes down to reducing your site from a labyrinth to a straight path for the mouse to get the cheese. I think it's a good practice to have only the required links on your page in general.
 
One of my favorite tactics these days is to write a highly relevant blog post and internally link it back to the corresponding sales page. I'll then link 5-6 mid-tiered metric niche relevant websites back to the blog content. This tends to give the keywords I am targeting on the sales page a real nice boost.
 
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