Member Avatar for Nare

Hi,

I have a question that has sort of been brought up here many times, but all i could find is people asking it specifically about PR and I'd like an approach from a more 'general SEO point of view'...

Say I have a site about bowling and i want my home page to rank well for this word. I know that I should use "bowling" as an anchor text of internal links on pages throughout my site (linking to the home page). Now the question is, do I do that with EVERY occurrence of "Bowling" or just with the first one on each page? Will 5 links from page A to homepage be better than just one? Or maybe i Should do more than one, but not too many? like 2,3?

Also, same question in regards to links from other sites. If I write an article about bowling on another site, and i could use HTML freely, should I just use the first occurrence of 'bowling' to link to my site, some, or all of them?

Thanks :)

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asked whether every occurrence of the word should link to the homepage. The short, practical answer: treat links as editorial signals, not as repeated SEO tokens. and set the right tone — dont force patterns that exist only for search engines — but this thread needs a few concrete, up-to-date rules you can apply today.

Search engines generally consolidate multiple links on the same page that point to the same URL. In practice that means one well-placed contextual link carries most of the anchor-text signal; repeating the exact same anchor text many times on the same page rarely amplifies ranking power and can look unnatural. What matters more is how many separate pages (and distinct domains) naturally point to your target, and whether the anchor text profile across those pages looks varied and organic.

Practical checklist to apply now:

  • Use a single contextual, descriptive link in each article or page that naturally fits the copy.
  • Vary anchor text across your site and inbound links: branded, descriptive (e.g., "bowling resources"), partial-match and generic anchors help create a natural profile.
  • Keep standard navigation, breadcrumbs and footer links for usability; rely on in-body links for editorial signals.
  • Audit your anchor-text profile periodically (crawl your site and review external links) and consolidate redundant internal links if they serve no user purpose.
  • If guest-posting or syndicating, aim for one editorial link in the article body with a natural anchor; accept host-imposed attributes like rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" when required.

Focus internal linking on user experience and logical site hierarchy. Let anchor text reflect relevance rather than serve as a repetitive keyword placement.

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Member Avatar for Dani

It's things like this that will get you penalized by the search engines :(

If every page on your site has the word bowling somewhere inside an article hyperlinked to your homepage, it's going to look awfully like it's done just for the sake of SEO, and the search engines will know that and discredit it (or worse, penalize you).

Also, anchor text with your keywords was most commonly used from various external websites ... not pages within your own website.

If you write an article about bowling on another site, link to your site in your signature. Search engines - AND HUMANS - both can sniff out search engine spam and what's called keyword stuffing.

If you do the best thing for your visitors and for people who read your articles on other sites, you'll get a lot farther.

Member Avatar for canadafred

... If you do the best thing for your visitors and for people who read your articles on other sites, you'll get a lot farther.

... absolutely must agree. Design and code for the visitor and let the search engine determine the authenticity and importance of what you have created. Then, after you are content with the extra effort that went into pleasing the Internet visitor - create more good stuff and keep creating more and more good stuff!

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