#1 This link order went just about perfect.
Strong site, gambling term, 10 links to a single URL, tripled page traffic in less than two weeks.
No exact, no partial, no phrase anchors, says Grind Stone.
100% natural on Tier-1.
#2 Local services, no geographic modifier.
5 links, would have done better if I hadn’t allowed any variation of the target KW into the anchor text.
All changes in position over the last 30 or 60 days, depending on when the links were placed.
All of these were through the last Google Core Update. (This information is dated 2022)
So, I mentionioned what link anchors I didn’t use, Grind Stone continues.
Now, let’s look at what I did.
I’m going to modify the target KW and the anchor so nobody can find the site but also show you exactly how natural anchor text (NAT) works.
Target KW: “jobs that pay good money“
Natural Anchor Text Used:
— for good money jobs
— start working for good money
— earn some real cash
— find the easiest way to earn money
— ready to work for real money
— a chance for employees to earn real money
— If you want to earn more money
— competing for higher wages
— earn real money
— work for larger sums of money
So we have zero instances where the target KW exists in Exact Match, zero instances where it exists in Phrase Match, and while some could argue that a few of those are Partial Match, the closest match is 20%, once.
Strong sites, relevant pages, relevant but natural links pointing to an optimized page on a strong site.
Tell me again why we need to use anchor text that matches our desired ranking queries for Google to figure this out?
The algo is dumb but not that dumb.
Based on what I saw earlier for ranking terms and longtails, I’d go so far to say that anchor text is one thing the algo is actually handling well (for them) now.
If you’ve been building anchors like it’s 2008 you probably feel different, I get it.
So this project: #2
The client supplied the KW they wanted to rank for and we built at the time what we thought were natural anchors but in reality, 3 of them were 67% matches to Partial and lesser matches to some long-tail Partials.
Guess which ones?
Yep, you got it.
The three terms bounced right out of the top 100.
The takeaway here is that NAT really shouldn’t slip into high % match Partials or you risk losing ranks for other terms.
Another way of saying that is every anchor text is exact match to some search query.
Digging in to confirm what we found on some of the other ranking snapshots, it appears like we killed some longer tail ranks by inadvertently building anchors for those ranking phrases while protecting the head phrases.