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Case Study: Edu Links WITHOUT Anchor Text Improve Client's Rankings
We are now six weeks out from fulfilling a client's order for edu links and we feel
we can report with confidence the results now from this specific case study.
Background
The client ordered the Keyword Domination Package from us back in early July. They are a mid-sized, regional real-estate company and were already ranking in the top 10 for most of their existing targeted keywords. We were hired to promote two of their new company divisions that had been in existence for a while, but just not yet promoted on the web. Both of these divisions had new, separate directories and pages within the domain. Before purchasing their edu link package from us, the client company had spent almost three thousand dollars with a fairly well-known SEO outfit building links to the pages. Unfortunately, it turns out that a good portion of the links were no-follow and actually there were not that many. The new division pages had about 100 backlinks each pointing to them when we took over and only a total of 3 edu and gov backlinks between the two sections. Because of the existing SEO work done thus far - and mainly due to the trust factor of the underlying domain - the new division pages were ranking between 15-30 for the associated targeted keywords when the job came to us.
Plan of Action
So after conferring with the client and developing a specific edu link strategy, we began building links using the anchor text keywords we jointly determined with the client were the best to use. What we soon saw was a surprise for us and the client though. After a couple of weeks, we apparently tripped some kind of filter within the search engines and the rankings for the products had dropped to between 30 and 40. Needless to say, we were surprised as this is not the normal results we have seen after we begin a job. As a test, we began changing up the anchor texts we were using for the in-context edu links we were building. We started using less specific words such as "click here" and "their new division", etc... In fact, we also were just using the specific URLs themselves in some cases. What we soon discovered was quite the pleasant surprise. Within two weeks of changing the strategy, the client rankings actually moved up very quickly and were all top five for the targeted keywords.
The Lesson?
The search engines appear to be placing less emphasis on keyword-specific anchor text links for edu domains - to the point of even having some kind of filter that is tripped if the same anchor texts are used repeatedly. Maybe this is because the educational web community is generally less familiar with the strength of specific anchor text keywords. Regardless of the reason, from this we are now encouraging all new clients to allow us to build at least some of their edu and gov links using this new strategy.
