SIA’s early test on home page linking to itself generated positive results. Since then, questions from members have asked about anchor text selection for those links. This test shows that creating a link on a page to itself with generic anchors will help rankings.
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Transcription below:
Alright, Test 654, Would A Page That Links Back Into Itself With A Generic Anchor Make A Difference? So this is kind of like the image thing. But instead of we're using a generic anchor, if you don't know what generic is, in regards to anchors, it's like, click here or read more.
There's tons of meaning in Google and if you want to, if you're curious, generic anchor texts examples. A cool way, all these words are all generic. They're totally unrelated. Anything like you can't look at these and think what that page is about. These are commonly used by SEOs to dilute the link profile.
In regards to anchor text, in particular, if you're been around during the penguin days, I mean, before Penguin, we can pretty much exact match anchor our pages and send a bunch of links to them. And Google be fine with it, the more you add the better. And then penguin came along. And now this generic anchor text came along. And it's essentially is a way to protect from the overs, optical preferences should you build links with having these generic anchor text.
Personally, I don't use these anymore, because they pass no value whatsoever to my website, other than maybe the potential traffic but 99.9% of your backlinks are not going to generate traffic. So why would you do this? It doesn't make any sense anymore. But I mean, here's a list you can find tons of the lists, if you want to and just kind of play with them.
So, we're looking at is if I link to via my page and I linked to the page itself using generic anchor text, what is going to happen? And before the test started, kinda expected the same thing with the images stuff. So here's the test page started up at the top with the generic link.
In this case, because it was too late and at the top right off the bat, we started the test you're like, I can't see anything. I mean what if it works? What if it doesn't just gonna be staying there? So if it works, then it works. And if it doesn't, you get this. The page is actually dropped out and down from the top two positions and these ones one, but why? It's about your anchor texts. That is the relevancy.
I'm linking to myself to itself. I've taken the relevancy from the keyword because I'm not using the keyword as anchor text, I'm using some generic thing. And that irrelevancy of that anchor text said, these pages are not as relevant to that money keyword as you think it is Google. And so Google drop those rankings. And that's exactly. That's how it works. And that's also why I stop using generic anchor text at all.
In lieu of generic anchor text, now, what you can do is use your entities. You can use LSI keywords, if I dare call them that. You can be on Twitter lately, you know that the flaming war where LSI keywords don't exist kind of thing. But you can use those kinds of words.
Mainly I rely on entities stuff, where I'm trying to reduce my exact match and my broad match and my brand and the exact match, brand and related searches. I'll throw in some anchor text to the entities that are on that page versus wasting the relevancy that the anchor text is passing to the page through the backlink.
With a click here, read more or that kind of stuff, that's this test really proves. I mean, especially on your internal links, you don't want to use generic at all. You don't have to go 100% exact match. I mean, I go 100% exact match until it stops moving up. And then I'm done building internal links. But there is people who say that they've seen 100% Exact match across the entire website.
If you have SEO on your SEO website, you have 100 pages, and they all link to one page with all SEO on it. The argument is that that is bad for your rankings and improvement. I haven't proved it, just saying I use 100% Exact Match until it stops moving up. And then I'm done building internal backlinks. In this case, you just don't build any generic internal backlinks on your website.
If you want to build a whole bunch more like you get the exact match and it starts moving. Switch to entities if you want to build some more to see what happens switch to, you know, related searches that are long tails, switch to brand only, but don't switch to read more, click More stuff, you're just wasting your time. And you're reducing the relevancy, your anchor text is passing on to your pages and then thus hurting the ranking of your pages. Any questions on that?