GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 22 - October 2012

The fact is that Google can read (and is reading) the text around the link to decide its relevance, so if you have a link in a great piece of content from a guest post or something similar, why ruin that by overcooking your anchor text? If the content is all about poker hands, Google can see that, so if you have the anchor text “generic poker site” linking to GenericPokerSite. com it is still going to attribute authority to the terms you’re after while protecting your site going forward. Remember, that isn’t to say don’t build any non-brand links; just make sure that your percentages shift more toward brand and compound rather than simply your money terms. Google has spent a lot of time and money buying and creating the technology to be able to discover the “intent” behind content and behind search itself. In doing this Google is taking steps toward truly understanding context, and when (not if) it can do this properly the content and context of links will become infinitely more important than they currently are. Developing a truly “natural” footprint on the Web To elaborate a little further on the last point I’m going to show you what a smaller-sized brand should naturally look like without having started link building for SEO purposes. This should be an indication of what you are trying to replicate, but in greater volume, in better content and perhaps with some alt text for any banner-based links (if you’re an operator you should have a lot of these being placed; if not you will find it a little more difficult to get these, but they are still worth placing when you can). After looking at this you can see very clearly that all those links saying “poker” and “online poker” to other sites all look a little obvious. www.pokerxe.com (14) pokerxe.com (6) http://www.pokerxe.com/userregistration.aspx?crb=signup-viprake (4) [img] pokerxe (4) [empty] (4) Other (15) [mention] pokerxe.com (44) [img no alt-text] (24) This example is the link footprint of PokerXe.com. As you can see they have not been aggressively link building in any way. (As it happens they don’t rank particularly well in the SERPs, but in terms of ratios this is exactly what a natural footprint should look like.) In terms of text links you can clearly see that the most commonly appearing anchors are brand related. (Chart from link research tools) The Penguin Update didn’t take the industry by surprise. We knew it was coming and we were already seeing brand-based link building have a larger impact. Based on a study of sites I did for another well-known gambling webmaster on sites which picked up penalties following the original Penguin update we are able to ascertain that they had one thing in common: too much emphasis on Money terms. “Google can read (and is reading) the text around the link to decide its relevance, so if you have a link in a great piece of content from a guest post or something similar, why ruin that by overcooking your anchor text?” Future Proofing SEO