My SEMrush Webinar Completed

• by jakeaull

My extreme thanks to SEMrush and all attendees for my webinar yesterday on SEO Link Strategies and anchor text! Great fun. I thought I’d cover some questions that were sent to me below:

Q1)      I missed the first 5 minutes of the webinar – can you let me know what you said about “the power of the Footer navigation”?

(answer) Footer nav has always been used for SEO because of the straightforward HTML text links – making it easy for spiders to follow the links.

Q2)      Optimally, what percentage of the backlink portfolio would we prefer to see using the URL as anchortext?  I think you said 10-12% but I wanted to clarify…

(answer) In the webinar, I meant that 10-12% sounded safe still for keywords in anchor text. As far as the branded URL, there should never be a problem using that in anchor text.

Q3)      A noindex/nofollow question, and here’s an example for the question – a homepage has internal links to the same internal page in the homepage header, body, and footer (say 3 total links to the same page).  Is it best to nofollow two of those three so there’s only followed link to that internal page?

(answer) If the links go to the same page, I don’t think that matters.

Q4) Follow up to that regarding outbound links on that same homepage … should we noindex the outbound links, nofollow, both, or neither?

(answer) Try to do noFollows on outbound links to other websites – not noIndex.

Q5)      Linkwheels – With related local sites, is there a max number of links to related sites (all owned by same company)?  For example, SanFrancisco.com, Sausalito.com, SanJose.com, Oakland.com, and 10+ more all linking to each other … is there a max number of those in the “wheel”?
Followup – any advice on how and where to put those throughout the site?  Would it be a “visit our sister sites” area of the homepage or footer?  Or maybe just some logos for them toward the bottom of the homepage with “Sausalito.com” anchortext and link?

(answer) That whole model sounds like exactly the kind of thing Google has been cracking down on and penalizing. But if you have to do it, then yes an area on the homepage or footer like that might not be too harmful.

Q6)      Any advice for a large corporate site that is changing (upgrading) their URL to a brand new one?  I’m thinking redirect the site and 301 all pages over to the respective pages on the new site, but I expect it’s a bit more involved than that?

(answer) That’s my immediate thought for execution. But don’t forget that no matter how hard you try, you’ll have old directories, local channels, social media sites etc. that you’ve forgotten about with links to wrong domain. You should research all your backlinks – you might want a plan to resolve those – because the old backlinks will stay pointed to the old domain if you aren’t able to request changes (yes you’ll have re-directs and 301s, but some of those backlinks may have had value you don’t want to lose, and the redirects affect usability). Also realize that domain history factors heavily into SEO rank – the older the domain (as long as it doesn’t have black-hat penalties), the better the ranking.

FYI you can find my slide deck at slideshare.net/jakeaull as recap – on one of the slides it also lists my research sources on anchor text and SEO links – so you can check that out if you wish.