SEO | Do You Anchor Your Links Like A Newbie?

=P
Yeah, I personally have no problem with people anchoring their names . More keywords for me =)

Thanks Griz, and glad to see you posting again. I’m moving, so I haven’t had a chance to read all of your news posts. Packing is a pain.
Got my first apartment =) (use to live in a dorm room at college)

Will do Gabe. I think my contact form might be messed up.
(I’ve been playing around with the design and code a lot)

For Google, it doesn’t matter what anchor text you use on nofollow. Google doesn’t pass authority for nofollow links (or shouldn’t). Different search engines don’t treat nofollows the exact way Google does, but Google sends the vast majority of traffic.

There are other reasons to anchor your name and stuff. Some bloggers don’t like you anchoring your keywords when you leave a comment. I personally don’t mind, but there are several bloggers who will spam you for a keyword anchored link. In that case, you just go with your name.
Another reason to anchor your name is branding. Although I don’t agree 100% with Caroline Middlebrook, her commenting method helped her brand her name. You saw her commenting everywhere, so you constantly saw her name. And Court puts a lot of work into branding his name.

And I guess it comes down to if you’re using comments as a link building method. Some people are against commenting for links, so it depends.

And lastly, it can help with your variation. It looks natural that you’re going to be getting some links for your name instead of all keyword anchors. I personally want this site to rank for my name, but thats a secondary goal.

Google and Yahoo do not pass kw authority or juice in the case of nofollows. However, in the overall scheme of things, getting links to your site with no keywords is important–this makes your backlinks look more legit.

So getting Nofollows with “Griz” or “MJ” will help my links of “SEO” look more natural.

So no-follows don’t matter in terms of the anchor, but they’re important to get in the overall strategy.

Yeah, I really like the new theme. A friend of mind helped me out with the graphics. Its actually a modified version of the dateless sniper 2.0 theme court put out =P
It was going to use a black background, but I thought the white looked more professional. The zombie blood is enough. I was afraid a dark blog would turn people off.

I apologize for the negative tone of the article. The purpose of the title and approach was to get attention and generate conversation. I try really hard around here to reply to and help people out the best I can. At the same time though, I am an internet marketer so I try to sometimes write titles and articles that stir an emotional response from people (positive or negative). Some people responded to this article in a very positive way, while other may have hated it. Either way, it got people talking and reading, which is my job as a blogger / marketer.

The overall goal of the article was to teach a lesson. There is useful information in that article, but its wrapped in emotional charged language. As long as people walk away from the article knowing how to anchor a little better, I’m happy.

I apologize if my article was rude though. I do have my own style of writing, which might appear brash at times. I will work on cutting back on that.

I’ve read some vague stuff on nofollow. Google says that if another site links to it, than not to worry they’ll find it. The nofollow name is kind of “wrong” imo. Its not that Google cannot see the link. I’m sure they see it and notice the link and may take note of it. The point is to prevent passing authority.
But there have been posts where people have built nothing but no follow links to a site and it got indexed by Google. Also, you can see links showing up in Google webmaster tools that are nofollow. So they see them and do count them at times, but its safe to assume they’re “useless” for building authority on Google. They do have uses though.

You can build authority for keywords that don’t get searched. People do that in SEO competitions, they use a random keyword that has no indexed pages. But you’ll get authority for “Blue Widgets” with any anchor text include those words. If you targeting “Blue Widgets”, I would suggest trying to get a few anchors with the exact anchor.

Thanks for dropping by Brent.

I’ll go check out Dan. Yeah I agree with the anchor text thing. Varying your anchor text is hugely important imo. I try to vary it in a way that includes the keyword, instead of just something like “Make Money Online”
Things like “make money bloging” “how to make money” “ways to make money online” “make a living online” etc

Then always get the site title and url links as well. And I get a fair bit of name anchored links by commenting.

I think it all depends on the natural linking coming in as well. If you’re naturally generating links from people w/o asking, they use all sorts of anchor text. Which provides a little noise to hide your link building efforts.
Link bait many times can generate links, but usually not with the “best” anchors.

“He is one of the top guys in the industry.”

LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Noobs always crack me up!

Yeah, I use my name a ton. If its nofollow (most blogs are), than I just go ahead and brand my name or my site name. About 80% of the time I spend on “dofollow blog” though is for the purpose of link building. I do read a few dofollow blogs, but mainly I am commenting for a link. (I don’t spam. I actually try to contribute some content)

Usually I look around the blog a bit to see what they’re like. If I think I can get away with the anchor than I go for it. If there is a risk of them spamming me, I just get my name.

Lucky for me I can get away with anchoring “SEO Zombie” all the time. People don’t seem to mind.

Totally agree. With general sites or trends sites (like in Vic’s competition), the homepage anchor doesn’t really matter too much. And good internal linking can do a very good job at spreading that PR around internally.
Most of my sites are very keyword targeted, but I plan on starting a “news” type site next month to see how it goes. I won’t be targeting and specific keyword, so I can just anchor my name or brand.