Google’s 50 March Updates – The Death of Anchor Text?
Last week Google released the latest list of updates made to its search algorithm, with 50 in total ranging from “Improvements to Image Search relevance” to a new “Tennis search feature”. However, of the 50 updates, a couple stood out as being potentially very significant and which will cause companies to alter the way they approach their SEO campaigns. Both these updates related to the anchor text used when link building:
- “Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename “PC”] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.”
- “Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.”
The SEO community has long been debating the diminishing influence of anchor text (we discussed its influence here last month), due to it being easily manipulated and susceptible to spammy link approaches, often with lots of success in Google’s search results. There has been a lot of conversation as to what the ‘classifier’ is which has been turned off, with many suggesting it could be the influence of ‘exact match’ anchor text (such as ‘car insurance’ if you are targeting that phrase). If that is the case, link building approaches will have to be altered to create more variation in the anchor text of your links (such as ‘best car insurance’, ‘great car insurance’, ‘high quality car insurance’) in order to mimic a natural link profile more closely. The second issue of contention is the method by which Google has improved how they interpret anchor text. This seems to suggest that factors beyond just the anchor text will be taken into account, possible meaning that the copy around a link could be influential in determining the link’s influence as well. This would increase the importance of the context of a link and diminish the value of getting links on low quality sites with spun content. So how should you be approaching anchor text? Is it time to completely forget the anchor text and stick to branded link building? Probably not, anchor text will still carry influence. But the importance of having a more balanced link profile is certainly on the rise, so if you’ve been playing anchor text heavy games then you should be thinking about balancing that out sooner rather than later. The key now is to incorporate more variation. Include some exact match anchor text in your links if you can, but also more variations of your target phrase. This could be longtail versions of the phrase or the phrase incorporated with the brand somehow.
The graph below provides a nice breakdown of what you should now be targeting and how that compares to what would have been successful just a few years ago:
So, is the influence of anchor text dead? Unlikely, but the tide is definitely changing and your link building approach needs to reflect that in order to build a campaign which will succeed in the coming months and years.
If you’d like help or advice on how best to shape your link profile, drop us a line on 0845 555 5040.