Getting the Most out Of Your Anchor Text: It’s not as Simple as you Think

For any SEO campaign, whitehat or blackhat, anchor text is imperative. Just getting you backlinks doesn’t matter without proper anchor text. That’s a given, that almost every SEO knows. But today we’re going to explore variance of anchor text, and how it affects ranking (especially in SEO campaigns where links are gotten quickly)

For this entry, we will pretend we’re trying to rank for Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes

How it Used to Work
Back in the day, trying to rank for “Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes” would mean you spam or send out your link always using the anchor text “Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes”, and the ranking would appear. However, with the introduction of the sandbox, and a few other anti-spam constraints that Google has built in, this no longer works. At least not if you’re getting your rankings quickly.

Why This Doesn’t Work Now
The sandbox and other anti-spam constraints(including the anti-Google Bomb algorithm) means appearing too heavily for most less common niches results in penalization. On the chance that you can avoid that via slower link building, Still, you will rank for that keyterm, and probably nothing else. Neither situation is our best case scenario.

How it Works Now
Now, you can’t just spam out the same link text over and over and expect to rank (in most situations/niches). Beyond that, we want to rank for more than one keyterm. As a result, you have to make sure your anchor text varies in order to get into that top spot. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to say “fuck my targeted key phrase”, and use junk text. It’s possible to intelligently add your link text and come out on top.

How to Pick Intelligent Anchor Text
Now, the beauty of modern day anchor text is that there’s overlaps that benefit rankings. An overlap is a situation where multiple key phrases you use in anchor text happen to overlap certain words, but not the entire key phrase with eachother.
So we take a few key phrases, say “Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes”, “Discount Marlboro Cigarettes”, “Discount Cigarettes”,”Cheap Cigarettes”, and “Buy Marlboro Cigarettes”. Examine the table below to understand the crossovers that occur.

Anchor Text Overlap Table
	Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes	Discount Marlboro Cigarettes	Discount Cigarettes	Cheap Cigarettes	Buy Marlboro Cigarettes
Cheap Marlboro Cigarettes	N/A	Marlboro Cigarettes	Cigarettes	Cheap Cigarettes	Marlboro Cigarettes
Discount Marlboro Cigarettes	Marlboro Cigarettes	N/A	Discount Cigarettes	Cigarettes	Marlboro Cigarettes
Discount Cigarettes	Cigarettes	Discount Cigarettes	N/A	Cigarettes	Cigarettes
Cheap Cigarettes	Cheap Cigarettes	Cigarettes	Cigarettes	N/A	Cigarettes
Buy Marlboro Cigarettes	Marlboro Cigarettes	Marlboro Cigarettes	Marlboro Cigarettes	Cigarettes	N/A

Analyizing our Table of Anchor Text�
Ok. So, looking at those overlaps, we can see what phrases(in addition to our selected of 5 keywords) we’re getting some anchor text power from.
We have the most overlaps for the word “Cigarettes”. This is good, as it’s our most competitive term. In addition to the overlaps that are only cigarettes, we have multiple overlaps involving that word. Now, we probably will not be ranking for cigarettes any time soon. However, it allows us the ability to rank for a lot of terms that are simply added on to cigarettes.
Since we have marlboro, cheap, and discount overlapping quite a lot as well, we are given extra power for anything involving those words. So “cheap cigarettes” would be drawing on the power of several keyphrases involving the word “cheap”, manymore involving the word “cigarettes”, and then get a LOT of juice from any that overlap with the phrase “cheap cigarettes” directly. So we’re doing good. That’s not our targeted keyphrase though. However, it’s important to realize exactly how much power we have for each of those terms individually, then combined with eachother. Now, adding in the word “marlboro”, we pull in yet more power from the overlaps, making us a shoo-in to rank.

So with that setup, we should easily be ranking for our desired phrase of “cheap marlboro cigarettes“. However, there’s so many different ways to distribute our anchor text into different possible searches, that we’ve actually probably picked up good rankings in several keywords, vs the one we probably would not have gotten if we’d used solely our own link text.