Is your Anchor Text Profile Setting you up for Failure?

• We haven't received the dreaded unnatural links notice yet, but I'm concerned our backlink profile may be too heavily weighted on certain anchor texts that will cause us problems. Can you help me identify the red flags so I can mitigate any issues before they get us in trouble?

Answer: You are right to take a proactive approach in policing your anchor text backlink profile. With Google slapping down sites right and left with unnatural link notices in 2012 knowing how to penalty-proof your site is an essential move for the average site owner.

Accomplishing this though means being able to examine the backlink profile of your site and those of your clients, and recognizing when the anchor text distribution of these backlinks (the keywords used within the links to your site) are unnaturally weighted. Being able to visually view your anchor text breakdown and know at a glance if something is "jinky" is actually easier than you may think.

For example, take a look at this screenshot for noted volunteer abroad and current SearchEngineNews.com subscriber Global Volunteers.

The above graphic is a visual representation of what a "Natural" anchor text linking profile looks like. You can see that the anchor text breakdown for Global Volunteers is heavily weighted towards brand keywords and actual URLs and contains nothing that would look "unnatural" or cause concern if the site was manually reviewed by a Google Engineer. Although you can see that the represented anchor texts lack a lot of exact match target keywords, Global Volunteers is a strong site that ranks competitively in Google for dozens of high-volume keyword queries.

In contrast, here's the anchor text backlink breakdown of an ...