How To Build An Anchor List To Expand Backlink Profile

What Is An Anchor List
Keywords in the link anchors help to increase the effectiveness of the external links and speed up the site optimization in general. However, excessive use of transactional queries in anchors, for instance, keywords containing the words "buy", "order", "price", etc., can lead the site to a search engine penalty, as its algorithms will detect the unnatural origin of links.
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: 10% of the former ones and 90% 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
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 backlink profile increasing
- 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
- referring donors;
- anchors used;
- amount of the links;
Go to Serpstat and choose Backlink Analysis section.



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.

Text around the link
Conclusion
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;
- backlink profile distribution within the text.
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