Tim of SEOWizz fame and resident guru at Branded 3 has recently posted an article which he debunks popular link building myths.
One key point he argues is that Google is attributing the anchor text on the first pass of the bot and that changing anchor text once its been ‘indexed’ has no effect.
This is massive as one of the first things I (used to) do for every client was to check the backlink profile and re-purpose any links that were not anchor text based.
It seems the key is to get the link right the first time.
I need to see how this effects new links pushed into old content as that could be a huge hurdle for link aquisition.
That is a piece of advice that could come in very handy at some point. So, I guess if you screw up a link on the first time through, you had better remove that link completely and then add a new one with a few new sentences to the page as well.
Not true, I do that all the time, dozen of times in the past two weeks and it sees and follows my new anchor texts, and gives them credit.
Maybe this is true for articles and blogs hosted on the usual big submission sites, but for links from static pages on established, lower profile domains it doesn’t apply at all. Over the last 18 months I’ve had to go back and alter the anchor text for 6 or 7 different campaigns and Google picked up the change every time, even in one case where I was changing a singular to a plural.
Of course, your analysis still leads to the correct solution: get it right the first time! Ha.