Google clarified about Anchor Text and Ranking Effects, Internal Anchor text SEO: Internal anchor text is an important part of SEO which is commonly used as a phrase. If you use it properly in your content, it enhances your content quality even more. But wrong use can take down your organic search traffic overnight, even Google can penalize your blog.
Internal anchor text provides relevant information about the content to both the search engine and the user. In this article, we will tell you if the old Internal Anchor Text is updated, then how it affects the site. Or is there a downside?
John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) has told about all this while discussing about Internal Anchor Text and Ranking Effects in one of his videos.
Does updating internal anchor text affect ranking?
There are many web publishers who want to know that when we update old internal linking, does it have any negative effect? Can this affect the ranking?
Does changing the text of older internal links to help users understand them have any downside? Can it hurt the ranking?
John Mueller says
No. That sounds perfect. If you’re updating anchor text internally to make it more easily understandable by users then usually that also helps search engines to better understand the context of those pages. So I would definitely go for that.
Updated Internal Anchor Text Helps Ranking
John Mueller didn’t say that updating old internal links will improve your ranking. It only helps the search engines to understand better for that context page.
Here’s what John Mueller said for the Images
The one thing I would avoid doing is changing anchor text into an image. So if you have… a fancy font or something that you want to use on your pages and you change a link from being a text link to an image link and you don’t have any textual kind of connection with that image for that link then it’s really hard for us to understand what the anchor text is supposed to be.
Watch what John Mueller said in the video
