Does anchor text from internal links give you any edge ?

Anchor texts are probably one of the most important and influential factors when it comes to SERP results. SEO’s pretty much unanimously agrees that the choice of right anchor texts influence your search engine ranks.

But how about anchor texts from internal links ? Does your linking structure take into consideration the anchor texts while linking pages ? And if yes, how do you craft them ? Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz has written a thought provoking article here, where he is discussing the same subject – about the importance of anchor text in internal links.

Rand has come up with the following conclusions on his test.

- Internal Anchor Text Has Very Little Impact on the Homepage
- Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
- Beyond a Certain Point, Adding More Internal Links to a Page Does Not Neccessarily Flow More Anchor Text Value

Well, in a more understandable form, it means (more or less).

- No matter how you craft the anchor text for homepage, it pretty much depends on the anchor text from “incoming links” on other sites.
- Using the same anchor text for a page internally can trigger a pattern with Google and Google does not like too many pattens (A similar phenomenon to anchor text from other sites)
- In any page from the site, it’s not adviceable to have too many internal links. Now how much is “too many” – you decide.

And my ideas regarding this are -

- Anchor texts from internal links does not affect you in cutting your competition on the SERPs.

- However, internal links to internal pages from the most important pages, like the homepage and the most active pages does matter.

- It’s best not to follow a particular pattern while crafting anchor texts. This is true in the case of internal links as well as sourcing inbound links from other sites.