Author: Dr. Manus Ward │Head of Digital Strategy and Data Protection │Hotelconsultant.com is a qualified and experienced former hotel manager, culinary Olympic team manager and hospitality Head of School who is passionate about passing on the knowledge he gained from one of the few hotel digital strategy doctorates in the world to you the hotelier. Bonus: If you have any problems with this contact me (100% free) at manus@hotelconsultant.com or 086 8185829 on this or any aspect of your hotel’s digital strategy.
Why do we need to do this
Anchor text from other sites to yours that contains pharmacy, gambling or inappropriate text may reduce your search rankings or even get your site delisted from Google.
What does this mean
Google wants to place high quality sites at the top of searches and even more so place low quality or spam sites at the bottom of search engines. Google believes that anchor text is a good indication of the content and quality of your hotel’s site. Words like loans, gambling or adult related anchor text to your site could damage your rankings. Google also is suspicious of no text, links from images only so limit these too.
What do I do make sure not to do:
- Do not use pharmacy, gambling, adult etc. anchor text.
- Do not use excessively long anchor text as this looks like keyword stuffing.
- Do not have the exact same text on all anchor text to your site.
- Do not have linked images with no alt text.
- Do not have empty anchor text i.e. from no text or from tiny images.
- Do not have totally unrelated words (the anchor text should be related to the page that it is linking to).
- Do not only have the name of your hotel, you will not get a penalty but you will be number one for this anyway so use different keywords as your anchor text and to relevant pages e.g. “award winning restaurant Dublin” to your restaurant page.
How do I check my sites anchor text: Click on http://www.backlinkwatch.com/index.php and do the following.
You will then get the following page.
If you want the anchor text changed, contact the website and ask them to change it to something more appropriate. It doesn’t just have to be inappropriate you may simply want anchor text that is a better fit with your keyword strategy. If you have something highly inappropriate e.g. the anchor text implies you are an adult or gambling site etc ask the site to change or delete the link. If they ignore you, refuse to change the anchor text or ask for a payment immediately disavow the links.
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