Link Anchor Text Change.

[ganeshjacharya]

I am planning to change the link anchor text of a website entirely. Currently the websites anchor text is very long. It's something like, "Gold Coins in Germany" and I am planning to change that to "Gold Coins"

I wanted to know if I am primarily targeting Gold Coins as the targeted keyword, would changing the anchor text on all the pages of the website effect the ranking?

Ganesh

[gobeyond]

It will help, but not too much though. Backlinks from quality sites with the right anchor texts give your site more boost than internal links.

[ganeshjacharya]

Originally Posted by gobeyond

It will help, but not too much though. Backlinks from quality sites with the right anchor texts give your site more boost than internal links.

Hi looks like you did not understand my query. I wanted to know if changing the anchor text of the website's internal links effect on the search engine rankings? I primarily want to know experience of SEO experts who did change the anchor text of the internal links of the website and if their websites were penalized for the change made.

[ganeshjacharya]

Finally I am changing the anchor text pointing to the home page at all the pages of the website. If there is any major difference I will need to find out that for myself since no one replied so far.

[JohnW]

>change the anchor text of the internal links of the website and if their websites were penalized

The type of changes you mention are not likely to cause a penalty however any changes you make that affect the semantic values of the page/site will probably change your rankings. It could be positive or it could be negative depending on what you do.

[Chris Boggs]

Along the lines of what John is saying, it really depends how much anchor text you are using within your content to lead to the home page. If you have something along the lines of:

...keyword 1 provides the best keyword 1 in the keyword 1 market...

within all of your content, each keyword linking to the home page, this could have a negative effect. If you are trying to build links from within the content of each page back to the home page, I wouldn't overdo it.

If you are using the keyword in your CSS-style navigation, it could lose some potency upon repeated use to the same page, but should be uniform. However, if you are mixing up your navigation in different areas of the site leading to different product variations (geographic, demographic, etc...), you will be using internal linking more effectively.

Another thing, if you have the place, "gold coins in Germany" includes your target keyword, so why remove the "in Germany" from the anchor? It is my belief, and some may disagree, that the anchor text and the words around are analyzed for any relevancy factors, and that having additional words within the anchor text would probably not significantly weigh down the value of the target term. This is of course unless you decide to use 20-30+ words as the anchor text.

I am curious as to others' take on this subject. Good thread Ganesh, sometimes it takes a few days for people to get to them.

[JohnW]

>It is my belief, and some may disagree, that the anchor text and the words around are analyzed for any relevancy factors, and that having additional words within the anchor text would probably not significantly weigh down the value of the target term.

I do agree with this. IMO it is actually better to include additional words in anchors, beyond those that are specifically targeted.

[ganeshjacharya]

Originally Posted by Chris Boggs

I am curious as to others' take on this subject. Good thread Ganesh, sometimes it takes a few days for people to get to them.

Thanks for the complement Chris....

The rankings did not vary much. The website was crawled in just a day after the new changes where made. But it is too early to conclude.

I updated all the anchors on the 10th and it was crawled on 11 Jan 2007 01:22:59 GMT.

I today again updated all the links and added title Attribute to the link tag (<A title="Page Title" HREF="...">). Added all the keyword in within the title attribute. I think that should compensate the absence of the keywords in the anchor text. The link title attribute and the landing page title are both the same.

Now, I am not going to touch the anchor text a lot. I made 2 major changes very soon. If there's any more change, I will keep that for the month end.