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24May/12101
Anchor Text Optimization – How Much Is Too Much? 
In my last blog post I talked about how to rank in Google after their Penguin update. One of the things I pointed out is that Google is penalizing sites for "anchor text over-optimization." That is, if you get too many links with the exact keywords you want to rank for in the anchor text, you might get penalized.
Notice that I said you might get penalized. That's because there are some circumstances in which site's aren't being penalized. More on that in a bit.
After reading about Google going after over-optimized sites, I decided to do some data mining and see if I could figure out exactly how much exact-match anchor text is too much. Here's what I did:
1. I gathered 1,500 keywords from 30 very diverse markets. Everything from business to technology to transportation to food and beverage to chemicals. A wide range of markets.
2. I ran those keywords through Google to get all of the top-level domains ranking on the first page for the keywords. I removed all ranking inner page urls from the data set.
3. I checked the link profiles of all of those domains to see what percentage of their links had anchor text matching the keywords they were ranking for.
Before we continue, let me explain why I removed the inner page urls from the data set. As I also pointed out in my previous blog post about Penguin, Google is favoring authority ("big box") sites in their search results more highly than ever. That means that an authority site can get an inner page ranked with very little or no backlinks at all. Wikipedia is a big example, as is Amazon.com. They're all over the search results after Penguin, as are other authority sites.
What does this mean? It means that every single site we looked at which got negatively hit by the Penguin Update had a “money keyword” as its anchor text for over 60% of its incoming links. On the other hand, the sites that were not hit by the update had much more random percentages. Having over 60% of your anchor text being a money keyword did not guarantee that your site would be hit by the penalty (many of the sites not affected had numbers just as bad), but if under 50% of your anchor text for incoming links were “money keywords” it’s all but guaranteed you weren’t affected by this update.
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