Suspicious Anchor Text

[htdawg]

hi,
we had an agency check our site with a tool that shows us that out of say 1000 backlinks 170 of them have suspicious anchor text. digging a little deeper we saw that most of the anchor text was our company name, the next highest was our service. then i checked another site to see what type of sites were linking to us using those phrases and most of them were reputable domains like dmoz etc... so how reliable are these types of warnings and how can you tell if a link is "bad" webmaster tools has not given us any warnings yet for bad links etc..

[tedster]

Those warnings are automated and algorithmic. I'd say Company Name is no problem at all - it's good signal in my experience and actually a branding signal. However, Service Name "might be" suspicious.

However, unless you have a warning message, I wouldn't take any action at all. You might be hurting your self, especially when the links are from reputable domains.

[htdawg]

Thanks Tedster, yes no warnings yet, but in general our site has been fairly steady in rank over the years and all the updates that have passed. As our backlinks are concerned I think that since most of them are from reputable sites and outweigh a handful of suspicious links that we may have so as not to have any major impact on our rankings. I guess you could say that google might take those trusted links into consideration before penalizing a site.

[tedster]

I guess you could say that google might take those trusted links into consideration before penalizing a site.

Yes, definitely. It's a rare site that has absolutely no "bad" backlinks.