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How To Build An Anchor List To Expand Link Mass

Anchor-list is needed for a link-based promotion. It helps to increase search optimization performance and simplifies link publishing process.

What are the anchor and anchor list

Link anchor is a text which the user has to click for following the bound address. The proper anchor-list is a balanced list of the anchors which webmaster uses while buying and publishing the backlinks.

Keywords in the link anchors help to increase the external links effectiveness and speeds up the site promotion in general. However, at the same time, the anchor-list is extremely dangerous and may cause site's being filtered by search engines. This happens unless you use wrong anchors and backlinks with the absent anchor.

The anchorless links are the ones which don't supplement semantic aspect of the text. At the same time, statistically, the link works properly. The anchor lacking link might be looking like:

an image without <alt> tag;
the URL;
a text which is not considered as anchor (here, by the link, etc).

Stick to the following shares of the anchored and anchorless links: 90% of the former ones and 10% of the latter. Advanced specialists divide the links according to this ratio: 80% and 20%. This is also considered to be acceptable in the link promotion.

However, the most influential factors remain link's quality and suitability. The proper link anchors look like naturally inserted keywords. As a result, the link looks like this:

Linking text [anchor with the URL] Linking text.

Here is the same link in the HTML-code:

<a href="http://site.com/">ANCHOR</a>

Why should be the anchors combined with the plain text? It is needed to make the outer links look more natural, and the site could not be threatened with sanctions. At the same time, the inner link anchor has to be relevant to the page that is referred to.

How to build an anchor-list for link mass increasing

The anchor list building requires some preparation:

Determine which pages are prior for you and decide what exactly are you going to optimize by means of the link promotion.

Compile the semantic core with keywords clustering.

Develop the search optimization strategy for several months. To do this, you need to analyze your niche competitors. Enter a keyword to the search, create a text document, and build there a list of the resulted URLs. Analyze at least ten competitors.

As a result, you will know:

how competitors use anchored and anchorless links and you'll take it into account in the long-term planning;
who refers to the competitors. Note a topic and some pieces of the donor-site technical performance: domain age, site size, etc;
what amount of links your competitors have.

Analyze the Top-10 sites according to each of the keywords. Develop a strategy based on the real results which other sites managed to attain. This will help you to succeed and avoid filters.

Serpstat anchor analysis

Serpstat can help you to carry out such an analysis in order to see the competitors' strategy from the technical side:

referring donors;
anchors used;
amount of the links;

Go to Serpstat and choose Backlink Analysis section.

Enter the competing URL and the service will automatically generate the Overview which includes information about the amount of the referring domains. Also, there is a link mass grow chart. Besides, you will see the referring domains' levels, unique backlink history, etc. Such domain zones as edu and gov are considered as trustable.

Continue analyzing and move on to the most interesting. Look which anchors your competitor uses:

Export the competitor's anchor list. Then sort out the links to separate the natural anchors. Usually, useful content is referred to articles, reviews, site homepage, or a contact name that contains the site's URL. Finally, value how the links are distributed among site pages. To do this, you can use Top Pages report.

Competitors' top pages analysis in Serpstat

Using the generated table, decide what pages are suitable for publishing the links and what pages have to be paid attention to for distributing the link mass properly.

You should know that SERPs quite often may include competitors who decided to promote their resources in risky ways. It is better to avoid them not to face sanctions. For the convenience, fix the whole data in a table placing the anchors according to the target categories.

It is better to use combined with directly inserted keyword anchor links as less as it is possible. It should be no more than 10%-20% of the whole anchor mass.

Advanced SEO Audit: A Complete Guide To All Stages Of The Analysis [Infographic]

Personal demonstration

Our specialists will contact you and discuss options for further work. These may include a personal demonstration, a trial period, comprehensive training articles, webinar recordings, and custom advice from a Serpstat specialist. It is our goal to make you feel comfortable while using Serpstat.

Text around the link

Write a text which will include the links. While preparing it, the following recommendations should be taken into account:

Use the keywords, their synonyms, and word-forms.

Follow the grammar: start sentences with capitals and don't forget about the punctuation.

Harmoniously combine the sentences and don't make the anchors standing out of the context.

Conclusion

Anchor-list is a basis for the link promotion. What is the most important while building it — not to forget about the anchors' over-concentration which negatively influences the promotion and not to spam with the keywords following the 10%-20% limits of the whole mass.

To create the anchor-list for your project, you need to analyze your competitors. The main things that have to be found out are:

number of donors;
donors' technical performance;
anchors;
link mass distribution within the text.

Having gathered the data, distribute the generated anchors according to the site pages, as it is shown in the table. Technical characteristics and links to the donors themselves will be needed for publishing the links.

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