Oct
31
How often do you stop and think about the words you are linking in your blog posts and how they portray who you are actually linking to? I wrote about this subect at WebProNews yesterday.
Sometimes the connotation of the words we are linking aren’t so positive, and we might be linking to someone talking about a certain issue, and imply that they hold a certain position through our anchor text, that they might not actually hold (right Danny? 
).
This could potentially have a negative impact on the reputation of the person you are linking to.
For Example…
I wrote an article a few weeks ago that mentioned people criticizing blogs as news sources. I linked to a post from a blogger who had written about another writer who was doing such criticizing, but the words I chose to link seemed to indicate that the blogger I was linking to was actually the one doing the criticizing. That blogger called me on it, thinking that I was actually was trying to indicate such, and seeing his point, I changed the wording of the link.
The point is, you may be trying to actually give credit to somebody or pay them a favor by linking to them, but if you link the wrong words, you may be doing the opposite.
It’s just something to think about as bloggers throw links around so frequently.
Popularity: 5% [?]
It pretty much bores down to the reason on why are you linking to him. In your case, the anchor text might be a bit more sensitive since it involves reputation of the blogger.
Anchor text isn’t really a problem in most situation unless it is a filthy text being linked. You agree with me?
Wei Liang
Yes, it does depend on the reason you are linking to them I suppose. To be honest, I don’t know exactly how often it is a problems, but I would assume that it’s more often than most of us realize. I don’t think “filthy” text is necessarily always the problem. I think a lot of it has to do with context.
Perhaps you are right Chris. I should start looking out on the way my anchor text are used when linking to others. Thanks for the response on my doubts.
Wei Liang
Thanks for the great post, yeah, anchor word for links are really important, right?
Haha, you’re never going to let me forget that, are you Chris?
I agree though – I feel anchor texts can often be used more effectively and help build your identity at the same time. For example, my business specializes in search engine optimized press releases. Whenever I’m writing about my services, I’ll more often than not link via that phrase, as opposed to my company name – it just helps to build identity.
Thanks (again!) for the shout out
Haha. I learned something from that incident, so shout out earned
I try to adopt an inner linking strategy, we all know external links with optimized anchor text is a great thing, right?
but, consider your inner linking also! For example there is nothing wrong in trying to share your home page PR by linking to your inner pages or visa versa.
great blog!
I think that the linking issue is going to become more and more of a problem. With all the auto-link ads, external linking, internal linking, browser contextual addons, pretty soon we’re going to need some heavy duty personal semantic software to digest all the links and information for later use.
Thank you for the post this makes me to think
Great post! This is an informative post. Thanks for the useful information.
of course anchor tex…..is point important for link building and for quality traffic
I was reading Simon’s post but I don’t get it:
Is the writer of the post talking about PR juice or about using the right words when linking to someone?
Because I believe is not the same thing
I was talking about using the right words when linking to someone as a general courtesy. I wasn’t getting into to the PR or SEO aspects of linking.
Thanks Chris. I thought I got it wrong after reading Simon’s post.