Robert_Charlton - 9:25 pm on Apr 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

...but varying anchor text seems at the top of the risk list right now (and follows the years of WebmasterWorld "vary your anchor text" threads

steveb - Are you saying that varying your anchor text can hurt you... or simply that it isn't producing the number of rankings that it used to?

At the risk of going too far off topic here...

To look at the latter... It used to be that you could rank for varied modifiers, eg, by including them in your inbound anchors. Now, as Google is tying inbound links more strictly to onpage content, you don't rank for these modifiers unless they're also on your target page. I'm not sure, though, these anchor text variations specifically hurt you. Conceivably, they could still be helping your core phrases by lending "naturalness" to your links, but perhaps only to a degree....

In the phrase based system, though, I do see where excessive onpage variation could help you, but I'd be hard put to come up with that many variants on a page.

I also remember reading something about excessive variation in inbound anchor text too, but I can't lay my hands on it right now. Maybe someone else can find it. If Google is covering onpage patterns in their patents, it's only natural that they'd cover linking.

Here's what Google says about the excessive variation for onpage, with my emphasis added....

Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system [appft1.uspto.gov]

[0010] The information retrieval system is adapted to identify a spam document based on the appearance of excessive number of related phrases in the document....   "[0213] From the foregoing, the number of the related phrases present in a given document will be known. A normal, non-spam document will generally have a relatively limited number of related phrases, typically on the order of between 8 and 20, depending on the document collection. By contrast, a spam document will have an excessive number of related phrases, for example on the order of between 100 and 1000 related phrases. Thus, the present invention takes advantage of this discovery by identifying as spam documents those documents that have a statistically significant deviation in the number of related phrases relative to an expected number of related phrases for documents in the document collection.

Google does somewhere discuss linking patterns that are out of the norm... I'm sure meaning again, too much variation.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:32 pm (utc) on April 7, 2007]