Living in a post Penguin 2.0 world all webmasters, site owners, and SEOs should be aware of what their “Internal Anchor Text Ratio” is.

penguin 2.0

Like over optimized external links to a site, it is also possible for a site to get in trouble with Google’s algorithm if it uses too many internal links with keywords. It is rare, but it can happen. Also, knowing a sites “Internal Anchor Text Ratio” can shed light on why sometimes Google might change the search engine result title tag.

Step 1:

Crawl your target site with Screaming Frog & export “All Anchor Text”

Step 2:

The “All Anchor Text” export will also include outbound links so you need to remove these from the data export. I simply just sort the “Desitnation” column alphabetically and then delete the outbound link rows:

Step 3:

Now that you have all your data cleaned up you need to select the data in the “Anchor” column and create a pivot table.

Step 4:

Now on the right hand side select “Anchor”.

Step 5:

Then drag it to the “Values” section. This will give you your anchor text counts.

Step 6:

To get the percentage or ratio of anchor text drag the “Anchor” again to the “Values” section so that you have two. Then right click on the second “Count of Anchor” then select “Value Field Settings”.

Step 7:

In the “Value Field Settings” click on the tab “Show Value As” then select “% of Column Total” and this will get your percentages.

Step 8:

Then you need to sort either column to get your top used internal anchor text.

Final Results:

As you can see doing this analysis on our own site shows some interesting data. The top anchor text is “Reply”, but this is most likely because of the WordPress blog setup of the site. A good rule of thumb is that if you see any internal linking over 20% you might have a problem.

If you have experienced an internal anchor text penalty let us know what happened in the comments below!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HOW CAN WE HELP

Tell us a bit about you and a team member will be in touch ASAP.


ALMOST DONE!

I’m interested in discussing...

Some of our Clients

Acceptance Insurance
Crystal Geyser
Nikon Logo
Tandem Diabetes Care