Possible filter/penalty for internal anchor text? (advice needed)

[theaffiliate]

Just checked rankings for one of my websites and noticed it has shot down a fair bit in Google.

The website name remains at position one, but almost all other keywords which were in the top 10 are now no longer in the first ten results pages and a lot of the longtail traffic has disappeared too.

The website has been ranking perfectly fine for around a year and has a decent link profile and is PR3 (quite a few internal pages are PR2). Link building has been done consistently and unique, high quality content is added regularly.

Only one major change has been done recently, although this was around a month ago and the website has been regularly crawled since then but the impact on SERPs has only just happened?

Previously, many of the content pages had keyword anchor text links (with a targeted phrase) to a "buy now" page (located at /buy.html). I changed most of these over so instead of going to the domain.co.uk/buy.html page they go to the domain.co.uk/, in an attempt to get the homepage to rank for the phrase as it is more useful for visitors to land on the homepage.

Some pages have around five targeted keyword links pointing to the homepage. Could it be this that has caused some kind of filter/penalty from the anchor text and Google is seeing it as spam? (Re: usability, the website converts very well in it's current form).

If this is due to internal anchor text links, would it be better to remove the links from pages pointing to the homepage altogether or change them back to point to /buy.html?

Would really appreciate any advice on how I can hopefully get the rankings back.

 

[Blossom]

Hmmm....what are your external links like? Check at opensiteexplorer.org if you haven't already.

With the rankings that have disappeared from G, which URL/s was/were being displayed for the search result? Your homepage, or...?

 

[theaffiliate]

Hi Blossom, external links on that tool are varied and all good. I'm guessing it must be something else or on-site due to it being such a sudden change (rankings have been steady for a long time until today).

All the ranking keywords in Google were for the homepage. It's quite a niche area and the homepage is most suitable for visitors to land on when searching for the keywords.

To put it into context, the website name is similar to BuyWidgets.co.uk and it still ranks for that phrase. However, some of the internal pages have links to the homepage with anchors such as "where can i buy widgets" "who sells widgets" etc multiple times on each page.

Changing them to point to the homepage didn't seem to make any difference, as before I changed the internal anchor text links to point to the homepage, the rankings were the same as they were before today (I only did it as I wanted to target the homepage new keywords).

Thanks in advance

 

[Blossom]

Do you have a link to the homepage anywhere above the 'links to the homepage with anchors such as "where can i buy widgets" "who sells widgets" etc'?

 

[theaffiliate]

Do you mean physically above the keyword anchor links which are on the pages?

If so, yes. The logo is in the top left corner of every page and links to the homepage (with the title/alt set as "Buy Widgets") and there is also a link to the homepage from the sidebar menu, which just has the anchor "home".

 

[Blossom]

Ok, in that case, for anchor text reasons alone those extra links aren't doing you any favours. Google only counts the first instance of anchor text on a page for a given link, so only 'Buy widgets' will count.

However, number of internal links linking to a certain page is still a factor, and if it makes sense for visitors as well then you may want to keep them in if you really want...but I would suggest taking them off for a couple of weeks (or put them back to the buy page if you prefer). I'd recommend focusing more on getting external links with the homepage anchor text you want, particularly from good quality websites. Out of interest, what PR rank does the site have?

 

[theaffiliate]

The homepage is PR3, and a fair few other pages are PR2.

Will continue to build links to it although I'm fairly confident the loss of rankings aren't to do with that as all the external anchors are pretty varied and have been built over time (surely if there were too many external keyword anchors, a competitor could be ruined easily?)

Can understand the homepage losing rankings if it is due to the internal anchors, but other pages losing rankings too slightly confuses me. Was previously ranking for a long time for keywords like "buy widgets in london" on a page but they have gone now too.

Thanks for the advice, that's useful to know. Have started to remove about half of the links which were going to the homepage and the ones which are left have been changed back to /buy.html with a "buy now" anchor instead of an optimised one.

Any other recommendations on what could have caused the loss would be appreciated. Not a good feeling when it happens to an established site, today's earnings are about 10% of normal :?

 

[Blossom]

The homepage is PR3, and a fair few other pages are PR2.

Will continue to build links to it although I'm fairly confident the loss of rankings aren't to do with that as all the external anchors are pretty varied and have been built over time (surely if there were too many external keyword anchors, a competitor could be ruined easily?)

I wouldn't say your external links are a factor in the loss of your rankings, but they will certainly help you regain. Internal linking will only get you so far up the SERPs.

Can understand the homepage losing rankings if it is due to the internal anchors, but other pages losing rankings too slightly confuses me. Was previously ranking for a long time for keywords like "buy widgets in london" on a page but they have gone now too.

Any other recommendations on what could have caused the loss would be appreciated. Not a good feeling when it happens to an established site, today's earnings are about 10% of normal :?

It's really difficult to say without knowing the URL or the specifics of what was ranking where. Have you made any other changes to the pages? It's possible that you had one very strong page that was anchoring your results across a number of terms and that dipped in value for some reason - perhaps it was the buy page and you changed the links, or you lost a valuable external link or two without realising.

 

[newguy]

There could be so many variables at play. I would say that, since you've made recent chances, give it another month and see if things settle down. Often I've been worried about something SEO related, only for it to work itself out.

 

[theaffiliate]

Just to update this, a couple of days after I improved the structure the website rankings are all exactly back to where they were before.

Could be a coincidence, although it would be a strange one if it is as the rankings have been stable for so long before. Strange how it took so long to get some sort of filter originally though (I think) but getting it back to normal was much quicker.

Thanks Blossom and newguy (and Google). Another SEO lesson learnt.

 

[newguy]

I'm glad everything worked out for you in the end .