Link building anchor text for local rankings 2020

[BrandonL]

Hi everyone, I wanted to get some feedback from people on if you are using local keywords in your anchor text with links. For years if i'm trying to rank a page in a city I've included a few backlinks to pages with the city in the anchortext but i've also heard that this may leave a footprint/ not work well anymore.

For example I have a site with about 100 inner pages, all unique content that we are trying to rank in different cities. The links I'm doing are a mix of generic keyword anchors and exact match such as "keyword orange county". If you have any data or have experimented with this, please chime in.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@BrandonL, it's hard to comment on this in in the abstract (as in it's not clear whether you're talking about pointing external domains to pages you're trying to rank, or internal links). But my general suggestion is to do "service" or "product," rather than "service + place" or "product + place." So more phrase-match than exact-match. I've found that to be effective

That's what I'd suggest for most internal links, and for external/inbound links, to a lesser extent. But the latter is trickier. If we're talking about external links (on sites you control or can influence), you'll want to use an even-lighter touch. The inherent problem is if you can control the anchor text on a bunch of different sites, and you point those URLs to 100 pages on your site, sooner or later you'll overdo something. Because when you're dealing with 100 pages on your site, and probably many pages on other domains, it's real easy to overdo things.

Less is more.