1. The New Anchor Text Distribution & Classifier

The Anchor Text Distribution and Classifier is the place where you can define your brand and commercial keywords in order to see the overall distribution of your anchor text cloud. This is a great feature because it helps you to have a clear overall image of the anchor text profile. Yet, for this classification to be as accurate as possible it is very important to identify the commercial and the brand keywords. For a quick reminder, the brand keywords are the name of your brand or the name of your website and the commercial keywords are the keywords that have a commercial intent and may be used by a person when searching in Google. A very simple definition would say that the Brand Anchor Text is one of the signals that Google takes in consideration when deciding if a site should be “trusted” or not, while the Commercial Anchor Text tells Google what keywords might the site be interested in ranking.

Understanding how to effectively classify the brand and commercial anchor text is crucial in order to have an excellent unnatural link detection classification.

The cognitiveSEO’s new Anchor Text Classifier allows you to:

1. Filter The Anchor Text

To make your job easier, we’ve created the Quickly Search Anchors search box. You can type here a specific keyword and the widget will only show you the anchor texts containing that keyword.
By default, the anchor texts for your entire link profile will be listed. But if you want to see the anchor text for live links only, you now have the show only live links option.
We’ve created some ordering options that will be useful if you want to take some snapshots to include in a presentation or to visualize the keywords that really interest you. For example you can randomize your anchor texts in order to make an image about your overall anchor text profile, or you can have your keywords ordered by their strength or by brand.

2. Bulk Classify Anchors

This feature allows you to to quickly classify multiple anchor text keywords in bulk. In order to do that, you first need to search for the relevant keyword and, then choose what type of classification you want (brand, commercial or misc) and hit the apply button. All those anchors will be classified in bulk instantly.

3. Classify Quicker by Showing Only Unclassified Anchors

Show Only Misc Anchors helps you to finish your classification process quicker by showing only the Unclassified or Misc Anchors. By checking this option you can see what keywords are neither in the brand or commercial category and might need to be further classified. When Show Only Misc Anchors is on, all your actions will be applied only on the miscellaneous keywords.

4.Individual Anchors Classification

You can choose to classify each keyword individually. All you have to do is hover over the wanted keyword (pass your pointer over the wanted keyword) and a menu with “classify as: brand, commercial or misc” will appear. Thick the classification you wish for and your job with that anchor is done.

If you don’t want to work with the Anchor Text Classifier or you’ve finished classifying all the anchor texts and you don’t want to make further changes, you can choose the Disable Classifier option. You can hit this button at any moment of your analysis. The process is reversible (meaning you can go back to classifying anchor texts any time you want).

2. New Unnatural Link Detection Features for Power Users Mostly

In the Unnatural Link Navigator ( the fastest & most accurate Unnatural Link Detection tool ) we’ve made some updates in order to help users who are working with thousands of links to save time and be more efficient.

1. Save a Bookmark for Easier Work Return on Big Projects

When you are working on big projects and you are dealing with thousand of links, it is very likely that you are going to divide your work amount throughout several days. Every time you launch the navigator it is highly important to know what your work status is and continue from the point you left it. To do that, we offer you the possibility to save a bookmark. Hit the Save button every time you want to exit the navigator and press the Load button every time you want to start working again from where you last finished. Extremely simple and extremely useful.

2.Know What Links You Already Saw in the Navigator and Filter by it

Every time you’ll visit a link, its color will change so you can easily identify which links you have already visited. Even more, you have the possibility to see and work only with the links you have already visited or only with the links you haven’t visited yet. All you have to do is go to Filters – Link navigator – choose visited or not visited.

At cognitiveSEO we try our best to meet the needs of our customers and continually improve our features. We don’t want our clients to have only the best results but also an excellent experience while using our tool. We invite you to check our new great updates and if you haven’t tried our tool yet, take advantage of the free trial and convince yourself by the benefits that cognitiveSEO can bring to your business.

To be able to test the system, we give free 14 day trials so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

The post New Anchor Text Classifier & Unnatural Link Navigator Power User Features appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Taking in consideration all the unnatural link penalties lately and the new ones to come, Google surely does not only look at the individual links, but it also looks at the Anchor Text Profile naturalness.

Google tries to understand if the anchor text pointing to a site looks natural or not. This can be easily done by the search engine, if they are comparing anchor text distributions for the sites ranking on a specific keyword or for the sites ranking in a specific niche.

Usually people tend to link to your site with anchor text that contains:

• the brand name
• an url
• navigational queries such as : click here, visit etc
• random words

Rarely you will see unbiased people linking with commercial keywords, because it seems that it is not in the human nature to link to a product or site with a “keyword rich” anchor text. (unless the site has an EMD or a partial EMD for a commercial keyword which kinda of explains also the value of an EMD).

Google knows this, and it tolerates it, because it still needs this signal in its ranking algorithm. It is still an important signal, until Google will be able to completely understand conversation, and I am sure this is one of their main technical challenges. Co-citation is another signal that Google started using, but the search engine is still relying heavily on anchor text as a signal to guide Google in ranking a site on a specific set of keywords.(one signal in over 200 signals)

Google already has keywords classified as being Commercial or Not (think about the PPC data they have). Brand terms are also easily spotted by Google. (sample: cognitiveseo/cognitive seo or any other derivation from that).

Knowing that Google does this, I am sure that everyone’s desire would be to have access to similar data.

To make your “SEO life” easier we upgraded our service with a feature that allows you to view the same anchor text distributions based on Brand and Commercial anchor text.

As a quick case study I did an analysis on two niches:

• payday loans (very spammy)
• buy flowers (almost natural)

This is how the Brand vs Commercial anchor text distribution looks like in each of these niches.

Payday Loans Anchor Text Ratio

Buy Flowers Anchor Text Ratio

In the first graph we can spot a very high ratio of commercial anchor text 61% to 94% for the first two sites. The Brand anchor text ratio is somewhere around 6% to 20% for those two. If we compare it to the third site, we can see a very high brand anchor text ratio of 53% and a commercial anchor text ratio of 22%. This signals Google a difference in patterns, which means that it is highly probable that either the first two sites or the third site is doing some shady stuff.

Looking as the second graph we can see that big brand sites have a high Brand Anchor Text ratio. One of those 5 sites has a difference in patterns though. This again might signal Google a potential issue and the algorithms will go deeper to investigate it. In certain cases this might be a false alarm, but in most of the cases big differences in anchor text profile distribution means something is unnatural.

Keep in mind that there is no secret distribution ratio like 60% Brand / 20% Commercial and 20% Misc. The ratio is related to the specific niche of the site. In some niches 70% Brand anchor text might be natural while in other niches 40% Brand anchor text might be natural.

To put it simply:

Brand Anchor Text is one of the signals that Google takes in consideration when deciding if a site should be “trusted” or not, while the Commercial Anchor Text tells Google what keywords might the site be interested in ranking.

Using this new cognitiveSEO feature you will be able to:

• Understand the overall distribution of Brand,Commercial and Misc Anchor Text ( Misc keywords are navigational keywords or keywords that do not fit in the first two categories)

• Browse over the Anchor Text Cloud to easily comprehend “What is What” (actionable also. click the keyword and you get the links using that anchor text)

• Filter by Brand Flag and be able to segment your link profile the way you need it for your backlink analysis.

Here are a few other interesting articles on the anchor text distribution topic:

• Anchor Text Analysis: Post “Penguin” and EMD
• How to Use Varied Anchor Text and Still Rank Well for Targeted Keyword Phrases
• Anchor Text Distribution in the Payday Loans Niche
• How and When to Diversify Your Anchor Text

What do you think on the Brand vs Commercial anchor text distribution ? What are the numbers that you see in your niche?

The post How to check your Brand vs Commercial Anchor Text Ratio appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.