The Importance of Anchor Text in Backlinks

Did you know that The Google Penguin Update was actually The 3rd of 4 updates dealing with ‘Link Spamming’? The updates were The Panda, The Pigeon, and The Pirate (yes, The Pirate). The link spamming targeted by the updates is called: – Online Reputation Manipulation.

And the link spamming targeted by The Pirate Update [Fourth] was: – Unnatural Influxes of Anchor Text in Back-Links.

You cannot overstate the importance of anchor text when it comes to a linking strategy. Back-links are crucial for search engine optimization, which is why they play such an important role in Google’s algorithm.

The importance of anchor text in back-links is so important it warranted updating their search engine algorithm twice inside 1 year.

Back to online reputation management for a second though. Partly why we’re covering this topic is because we’ve been seeing many new clients lately tell us that The Pirate Update was The Penguin Update – which is not the case, The Penguin Update is The 3rd of The 4 updates.

In any case, The Pirate update dealt with unnatural anchor text back-links being built from The Darknet and other offsite locations that were NOT attributed to the site being mentioned. In most cases, these types of links would be used as a result of attempts at ‘Black Hat’ SEO techniques – which no doubt have been given a share in the blame for what happened next…

The Google “Penguin” Algorithm Update

This forced webmasters to remove all their Black Hat/Unnatural Links or risk having their websites demoted by Google. When you consider how many natural links you need to get The First Page of Google, The Panda Algorithm Update made it impossible for ‘Black Hat’ techniques to get you the results you wanted.

The Importance Of Anchor Text In Back-links

So The Pirate Updates’ goal was to remove The Black Hat/Unnatural links pointing to The Darknets and other dubious locations as a result, but what exactly is Anchor text?

Anchor text is defined as The visible words that are hyperlinked when you place your mouse cursor over them – The term “anchor” comes from how a DIV tag works in HTML coding. DIV tags allow a developer to specify where text will go on a web page…the very center of where it will appear. The text in between The Tags is The Anchor Text.

Because The Anchor text provides a brief description of the website it points you to, search engines keep track of The Anchor texts that are linked to each webpage – this allows them to establish what The Page is about. It also signals whether The Link was placed there by choice or not…if The Links Pointing To Your Site were NOT placed there by The Website Owner, then you have Spam linking issues which will get your site penalized by Google via The Pirate Update.

So what does Google do if they find out that The Links Pointing towards your website are NOT natural? Easy – The First thing they do is remove The Anchor Text The Link contained and then The Search Engine will follow The Links to see if there are any other unnatural links pointing towards The Site.

If Google discovers another unnatural link, it will go through the same process again – removing The Anchor Text each time…until your ‘unnatural’ back-link profile has been completely removed.

When you consider that The Pirate Algorithm was released in 2012, The Penguin update rolled out 3 years later which means online reputation management companies have had to employ far more extreme measures when it comes to getting their clients on The First Page of Google via natural back-links because every back-link The Search Engines discover is being closely monitored.