As we all understand, drawing an abnormally large number of links too fast over a short time period has never been such a good idea. Webmasters should watch out for the acquired links levels, especially now that negative SEO seemingly turns into a bothering issue. There are a couple of quick ways of checking the link acquisition velocity of your site, using a select services and authentic expertise. In this post, we shall discuss some of the key links related over-optimization instances.
Elements that can trigger ‘overoptimization’ risk
Bear in mind the fact that higher number of blog-roll, footer, header, or sidebar links might trigger ‘overoptimization’ action. Keeping them minimal would be a wise thing to do. Some site-wide links may naturally have occurred. Employing Webmaster Tools for detecting site-wide links is a convenient and preferable method.
However, they won’t report all backlinks that Google actually sees, a 3rd party link intelligence service should be utilized for a more thorough investigation. These include Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer etc. While using a third party service, it is vital to remember that their crawlers don’t try to replicate Google’s behavior, hence the data can get significantly skewed in some cases. This can be the case in particular, for links from sites Google has taken out from its index, but these third party services will continue to report as normal links.
Overoptimized anchor text is a risky bet, especially in the wake of Google’s decision to turn off a classifier, which is related to anchor text or the visible one appearing in links). The search engine’s experimental data indicated that other anchor processing methods had greater success hence turning off this particular component made its scoring more robust and cleaner. Better interpretation and usage of anchor text thanks to improved systems used to interpret and use it, and decide how relevant an anchor might be for a a particular query and website.”
Analyzing anchor text data
Keeping in mind better interpretation and usage of anchor text, and to facilitate the same, the engine has improved systems its uses for the purpose, and work out how pertinent a given anchor might prove to be for any given query and site.
This task can get complicated because you ideally need as much possible anchor text data exported from different sources. Next you would be required to filter it removing the dead links, de-indexed linking root domains, no follow links, site-wide links. After you have applied these filters, rest of the backlinks data could be analyzed for various anchor text types like broad match keywords (for example, online hr software system; exact match targeted keywords (for example, hr software); brand terms (for example, www.breatheHR.com, BreatheHR); image links; and keyword + brand terms apart from ‘click here’, ‘this website’ and all other natural anchor texts, which might fall under any of these categories. After you classify all possible anchor text variations, it is relatively easier to pinpoint weaknesses.
Another aspect where overoptimization could happen is when backlinks are gained from authoritative domains on a consistent basis. Any high spikes could well be flagged by Google as efforts of PageRank manipulation. Carrying out these checks will help identify apparent weaknesses on the backlink profile of a site and be better guarded against Google’s ‘overoptimization’ updates.
