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How much is too much of a good thing? Can you try too hard to rank and end up making things worse?
Just the term over-optimization seems counter-intuitive. You can’t optimize anything TOO MUCH. Optimized should be optimal – right?
Over-Optimization Affects How You Rank
We’ve been monitoring several orders lately and noticing a glaring mistake in people’s backlink profiles. This mistake is absolutely holding these sites back.
Although it’s an easy enough mistake to make, once you know exactly what it is, you can fix it fairly easily. It might save your site and give you an edge on your competition.
Google has algorithms that affect your SEO results. We all know that. And an important one to know about is Penguin. It’s important because it’s critical to know what Penguin is up to and how to ensure your site is safe.
Back in 2012, Google came out with this algorithm update to punish sites that had used too many exact match anchors when building links. And punish they did.
Suddenly, sites that had ranked stopped ranking. Penguin rewarded high-quality websites. And Penguin minimized the search engine results page (SERP) presence for websites that appeared to use keyword stuffing or manipulative link schemes.
But how does Penguin decide if you were a “good guy” or a “bad guy?” Does your site deserve to rank high on that SERP? Or should Penguin punish your site by lowering your rankings?
Where to start? Let’s begin with Exact Anchors and how they impact what Penguin thinks of your site.
Exact Anchors for Building Links
An anchor is the highlighted text on your webpage that includes the hyperlink. When a visitor clicks on the link, they go to the other page.
The system is the same for both internal and external links. Internal links point to other pages on your site, like your blog. External links take the visitor to another website.
And these links are great for SEO. Like really great!
- Internal links help search engines clarify your site’s structure and topic. So, when someone searches for “air conditioning systems,” for example, they don’t get results about “car exhaust systems” or “new iPhone models.” Internal links help tell Google (and the other search engines) what you do.
- External links provide authority. That’s why it is so critical to link to solid, relevant sources. Avoid external links that might get taken down and stick to trusted sites.
- Anchor text explains the topic on the linked page, so your visitors are not led astray. If you have ever clicked on some anchor text and ended up on some page that surprised you, the site did not do a good job deciding on anchor text. The anchor text helps your ranking because it also provides context for search engines.
- “Exact match” refers to your anchor text (the hyperlink words) matching exactly with keywords.
So, this sounds like a good way to optimize your site. Just stick in a bunch of internal and external links that match what people might type into the search bar. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
Because Google knows. Google can sniff out unnatural linking if you try too hard. And trying too hard has never been attractive…
Where the Need to Penguin Proof Your Site Began
It was over a decade ago, so like a century in internet time. First, Google created Penguin to check your profile, and if 30% of your profile was one anchor, your rankings were at risk.
Within a year, in 2013, Google shifted the Penguin algorithm to penalize more sites. So, only 5-10% of your profile could be exact match anchors. Alas, even more sites were penalized.
You would think that by now, how to work within Penguin’s rules would be clear. But it’s hard to say exactly what anchor text percentage you should have because it varies by industry and by SERP.
You can check your Search Engine Rankings easily. CLICK HERE
We’ve looked into lots of sites, and you can DEFINITELY see sites with higher anchor text percentages still ranking… but it’s still something you have to look out for.
The thing is, Penguin runs constantly – so just because you’re ranking today doesn’t mean you’ll be ranking 3 weeks for now.
The Present and Future of Over-Optimization
None of this is new, but when we looked at some of our customers’ sites, we still see tons of over-optimized profiles!
In the past, Google would try to get the best answers for queries using both keywords and links. And that hasn’t completely changed. But they do have some newer approaches that make optimizing content touchier.
Sometimes the best content just didn’t show up at the top of page one of the search results.
Some people follow some of our advice to build anchors like “click here” and naked URLS – that’s all great… But for a lot of sites, they are already over-optimized, and it’s simply not enough.
How do you know how many is too many links?
The number of backlinks you need goes up faster than the difficulty ranking. Like, if your keyword difficulty is 10, 10 backlinks are probably enough to rank. But with a keyword difficulty of 50, you might need100 or more backlinks to rank.
What happens…?
If your site is already over-optimized, what happens when the NEXT Google update comes around, and they lower the acceptable percentage again?
Your site could be in danger!
But how do you know if a site is over-optimized? Or in danger of being in danger with the next Penguin algorithm change?
Now is the time to make sure your site is not already over-optimized and prepare for the future.
What to Do? – What to Do!
It sounds dreadful (and it is), but the fix for this is pretty straightforward.
The EASY way to avoid this is just to get a TON of non-optimized links. You want to really “pad” your site so that over-optimization isn’t even a question.
An optimal profile would have lots of links with brand anchors like “Starbucks” or with naked URLs like http://www.starbucks.com – so these are the types of links you want to be creating. If you can achieve that, you’ll be in a really good place to avoid over-optimization!
Sounds easy enough, right?
But where do you get these links?
When you build these links, you want to get them from quality, authoritative sites. And one of the best places to get them is through social media profiles.
You want to send REAL brand signals from good sites back to your money site.
You see, social profiles are the PERFECT solution.
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn are all high authority domains. Using social media profiles means that you send real links and real BRAND signals and diversity back to your site… all with NON-optimized anchors.
Plus, you can build as many social media profiles as you want! (Or that you have the time and patience for…)
Now, these sites aren’t going to RANK you, but they will protect you… And you definitely need that.
So, these additional links serve multiple purposes:
- They diversify your link profile
- They send brand / social signals to your website
- You can use them to seed your content across the web so more people will see it
Still sounds pretty great, right? But…
What to Do If You Have Other Things to Do
You can obviously do this yourself, but it takes quite a bit of time to register 50+ social profiles.
And you probably have something else to do. Specifically, something better to do!
As critical as this is for your website, you can delegate this. A good link-building strategy is vital these days, but few companies have the personnel in-house to spend the time it takes.
So, we created a service to do this for you if you don’t have the time… and we streamlined it, so it’s very affordable ($1 or less per profile!).
Your brand is hand-registered on the top social sites in the world. We’ll fill out your profile, upload a picture, and create a non-optimized link on the page back to your site.
Problem solved.
Put your mind at ease about the whole Penguin / over-optimization issue. The place to start is by scheduling a consultation for an SEO Audit HERE.
If you have any questions, just leave them in the comments!
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Clayton Johnson
Clayton Johnson is the CMO of The HOTH SEO company. He has over 8+ years experience in the SEO industry and has spoken at events like SEJ Summit. The HOTH has been featured in Inc 5000, Forbes, SMX, Pubcon, Content Marketing World, Affiliate Summit, Brighton and more.Join the HOTH insiders
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I don’t have a few links to my website, but just putting a mention on FB or Pinterest helps my website? What are exact match anchors?
Yep – Basically, when you register your brand and get links from social media sites, it helps to even out your link profile.
An exact match anchor would be a link that is your exact keyword. For instance, the anchor text of the link would be something like “lawyer denver” if that was your main keyword.
and I suppose an LSI for “laywer denver” would be something like: Best Lawyer In The Denver Area. I just made this up, however, how do I know people are actually searching for “Best Lawyer In The Denver area?” or does that really matter as long as the main keywords are in the title?
Everything always depends on your competition for any keyword. Give a domain enough authority, you can add near any long-tail keyword post with title and capture a first or second page ranking, relevant to the site or not. Relevancy usually just determines whether that keyword is going straight to page one, or page two, and whether you have to give an exact match to the match to get it to page one.
There are lots of ways to diverse your link profile. This method is just one. If your link profile is blatantly keyword matched, I have done similar to what Hoth here use in their Boost product, spun up a whole bunch of Tier 2 content, usually short is best, added naturalised links to each and then bombed a domain with it. Randomising the URL’s and natural terms. Drip it to the site. Suddenly the percentage swings away from over-optimised to more random.
Whilst such things are not advised if you have a small link footprint, if you have a large one, you can easily get away with such tactics without issue… especially now Google no longer punish you for bad links, they just discard them from hurting or helping you, yet achieve the job for diversifying anchors if needed.
There are lots of tricks to fix such issues. You could just disavow your entire link profile and start all over again, if it was ever that messed up.
Will it be really helpful ? I mean social profile for my brands?
I know it could give a valuable link but first time i hear it will help to saving from penguin.
Thanks if it will works.
Getting these natural links helps diversify your profile, that’s what you want to avoid Penguin penalties.
People are humans, they want to setup a site, make money, etc and by default, human nature says hit that keyword hard, so when they see those 5 blank keyword slots, guess what they do? It is actually quite easy to diverify your link profile. Dont use exact match keywords, otherwise known as money keywords; Do use random anchors, naked urls, generic anchors, etc. I looked a link profile of a site the other day, I thought it was a bit spammy, however, his site never used the same anchor twice, other then naked urls, generics, and ranks in the top 5 searches for his topic search! Even though his link profile looks spammy, it looks natural too google. In this case, being greedy to rank for money keywords doesnt pay, more is not always better, if you want to succeed, then use less.
Sounds, pretty interesting, I will try this.
I would also recommend people stop linking only to the homepage of their websites. It’s just not natural! It’s hard to believe that some of these obvious footprints were right in our face and we never realized it until after sites were penalized.
Its about psychology! When I first started, I sent all links to my home page, I used the same anchors, I used spun content, then watched $2,000/mo disappear overnight. You should absolutely send links to your home page, as your home page should have the most authority, but you should also send backlinks to your inner pages, and this is how page authority is increased. I saw an article the other day that was written in 2013, I am not sure how I found it, but it was on page 5, and it did not appear to have a single backlink to the page, and they probably often wonder why they are not moving up the serps, so in two years, that post has probably been pretty worthless because the site apparently does not promote their own content. With all the competition out there today, if you do not promote your site/inner pages, then your site will just continue to site there, and pretty much do nothing.
John, thank you for posting this information. I wish I had read it before watching my own money disappear. I only recently started diversifying my backlinks to to sub pages instead of just the main.
This is one of the perfect strategies that I have also used for many newly launched websites and works great. A combination of complete social profiles with link to your site and right content will surely make your website to rank on top safely.
Thank you for letting us know about Lock My Brand.
I honestly do not get the relation. From what I can tell, social media is worthless, even to compliment your link profile. I have several social media accounts, I have posted my naked url a number of times, and I have yet to see any social links get picked up as a backlink, none, nada, zero. You are right that social media will not make you an authority,social media only brings random traffic, overall, if social does anything, it will increase your bounce rate with random traffic.
Ok, I get it now, you are talking about a link setup in the social profile, for whatever reason, I thought you were talking about getting backlinks through social media promotions. I am sorry for the confusion.
Keep in mind, a lot of social links won’t get picked up by link aggregators like majestic, moz, and ahrefs so don’t expect to see them on your backlink reports. Most of the time you will see them inside Google webmasters tools though.
Since a social media account is pretty much worthless if you are not constantly posting updated. Not to mention it is hurtful to see a social profile with zero social signals as it means no one is interested. How do you tackle to problem of posting to the 50-300 social profiles that this program creates?
Also I understand that this service is designed to save you time because of coarse registering to 50-300 social sites can take some. If you want to know what takes even more time (about ten fold) constantly updating your social media accounts with new posts. So please elaborate as I am certainly interested in the offer just don’t want to put myself in a situation I can’t handle.
You can post to them if you’d like, but whether you use them or not, I would still suggest claiming them for brand protection.
You have revealed a great idea of a brand building..Of course this is a good information to be implemented..I was not aware of the power of social media..This brand building idea is great…thanks for sharing the valuable information on THEHOTH platform..
What does empty social profiles do, you will never use them to post. 50 profiles in themselves look like spam
You should post to them.
Once I have the report from LMB with accounts and login info, do I post content to those accounts? Also, can I use those accounts with services such as Syndwire? (I have an account there…)
Yes to both!
Hi. Great post.
Anywhay is it true that links from social media profiles dont rank your money site?
Thanks
They aren’t bad, we explain how to use them in this article. You will most likely need more links though.
What are naked links?
Naked Links = the anchor is the URL itself
When you say “get links from social media sites”, is it just by creating a profile or having people like and share the posts?
Optimally both.
Thank you..
Excellent article, I just put it into practice with 50 profiles in LookMyBran for my business page design AsturWebs.
I guess this will also serve for the domain authority, right?
Greetings and thanks
Great Article. i just admire this point “They send brand / social signals to your website”.
Good article. Will try if it works.
I never actually knew social links are this “potent”, thanks for the great advice. Fortunately my website is still very new and I can now obviously do things right from the start. Bookmarking this page for sure!
Useful article
i Will try if it works
This happen to be the best seo website i know
Social Media Profile creation is a good way to save your site from the Google Penguin Update. And yeah, they also help to provide the social signals to our site and that’s where the dual benefits of the social profile creation prove handy.
Good stuff shared. Traffic comes many social platform like facebook, twitter, stumbleupon and others social networking sites in my web page. but many sites Link my web page then so this is perform negative impact for SEO ??
Social media links are very good idea to start linking website. Good article!
Amazing Tips on social media linking for SEO!!
Awesome, glad you liked the tips!
Great articles ! It helps me a lot . Thank you so much for sharing this articles . Keep it up good works.
Thanks, you’re welcome!
Is there a service that you can recommend that will allow us to auto-post to the profiles once they are built?
I see that one of the commenters just mentioned Syndwire.
Are there others?
We just bought the 300 pack, so this is important!
Thanks!
Hey! I know that Syndwire is pretty widely used, but probably not as widely as competitors Outbrain or Zemanta
Really though, I’d go by price and ease-of-use for your purposes!
Thanks!
Great Article. I didn’t realize that you get an advantage from social profiles (“They send brand / social signals to your website”.)
Yes, it helps to confirm that your site is a real entity to have those profiles set up.
This article references the penguin update which was quite a few years ago. Is this info still up to date?
Can I read further somewhere about the “naked links” and all? Is it more important to build links on your page to others, like writing blog posts about complimentary businesses? Or is it necessary to have the link back to you as well?
Thanks for your help!
Glad to know this, its help a lot!
Great, glad to hear it!
Thanks for this penguin proofing guide, I think the tips in here apply to me and will help save my website from getting penalized.
Glad it helped you out, Basit.
Very nice stuff, I’ve shared it. Traffic comes to my web site from many social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and other social networking sites. But if too many sites link to my web page will this negatively impact my SEO?
It’s actually great that traffic is coming to your website from the multiple sources that you mentioned. Most people don’t worry about too many sites linking to theirs if those links are natural. The problem is that many people try to manipulate SEO by pointing a bunch of low-quality links from spammy websites built for that purpose, with links that have over-optimized anchor text. This type of linking does often harm SEO and it’s important to avoid it.
Hi. Great post.
Anywhay is it true that links from social media profiles dont rank your money site?
Thanks
Links from social media profiles can help diversify your link profile and strengthen your site’s brand as an entity, but it would definitely be a stretch to say that those links can directly rank your site.
HI First of all many thanks greatly for Shareing ur great Article
Thank you very much for sharing this.articles for a short while and they’re extremely helpful!
I already do this! Excellent. Then, I should be fine! I’ve noticed a marked decrease in the ability to do much with anchor text as well given the lowered amount of link opportunities there are. I’ve also found myself lately doing internal SEO by linking whole (descriptive) sentences to other articles and using anchor text like “Click here for the article”. That seems to give just as much of a boost as the old anchor text methodology does. 🙂
hey clayton
your article is really useful!!
see u next time in hothcon!
Very Interesting And Informative Article.
I have bookmarked your blog.
Thanks for share such type of precious information.