I’ve talked a lot about over optimization recently in the wake of the Penguin updates which came earlier last year in April/May. I specifically talked about anchor text recently, as well, and the 3 types of anchor text to the end of explaining which of the 3 types you should be using on your site.

When to Use Anchor Text

You have to be thinking in terms of syndication. Forget about the article directory ranking and forget about receiving any substantial amount of link juice from that article directory, neither of these is realistic anymore; it’s not 2007.

However, article syndication is still alive and well, even if article directories have gotten a bad rep after Panda and some webmasters have given up on them due to them being associated with apparent drops in quality (hence the content farm arguments).

You could make the counterargument that more webmasters are using them now under the belief that all of the people who were only in it for link juice and quantity over quality have dropped off and only the writers who care about their subjects are remaining.

Either way, it’s still worth your time for syndication if nothing else and all those webmasters scratching their heads wondering how to get their content on someone else’s website short of guest blogging.

Example: I checked out a recent article I wrote on my site in the Music niche which I submitted to an article directory. It got all of 15 views and only 1 click through (damn), but it was syndicated on a website which has an Alexa rank of roughly 5,000.

I included a targeted keyword as my anchor text in that resource box, this was kept intact when it was published on the high ranking site, and this shot my site to number 2 in Google so I’m getting a handful of visitors to my site every day after all thanks to that article.

Ultimately, it’s best to avoid over optimization in the form of too much anchor text pointing to your targeted URL. Google doesn’t need you to hold their hand anymore and too much anchor text pointing to your URL of choice doesn’t come off as legitimate when you think in terms of webmasters who would link to your site and the kind of anchor text they would use if they’d use it at all.

If it’s a high quality link, one you’re unlikely to get a lot of, then it doesn’t hurt to use your anchor text in this situation. You generally can’t go wrong with too many branding keywords, however, which includes your URL, so keep that in mind.