Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

Stallion WordPress SEO Package Your last line “So I am thinking links but the way Google sees links. Varied anchor text with a natural feel might help.” pretty much sums up what I’m aiming for with my sites which means changing Stallion so more and more internal links are varied: easy if you don’t mind a LOT of manual work**, hard to semi-automate which is what I’m aiming for.

** Already possible with current Stallion features and manually creating widgets to replace categories etc… and use the show.hide widgets on sets of pages feature. But doing it manually isn’t any fun :-)

On your categories idea you’ve touched on a slightly SEO greyhat technique I’ve considered, but it’s a bit too risky sitewide and definitely too much for a WordPress SEO Theme others are using (OK for me if I was willing to take the risk, but not adding it to a theme).

Let me explain. Whatever you do to/for your site always ask yourself could I explain what I’ve done to a reasonable person (a Google manual reviewer) and convince them I’m not gaming Google?

Look at the Stallion All In One SEO Keyphrases etc… that replaces the posts title being repeated over and over again on an SEO’d theme. how Stallion used to be (and is by default) repeats the post title all over the template, this clearly indicates to Google the title of a post is very important, please use for ranking purposes and it’s not caused issues on quality content sites (nothing wrong with this SEO wise).

If you use the All In One SEO Keyphrases many of the instances of the post title are replaced by what if you use the keyphrases correctly will be related SERPs to the post title. Generally you wouldn’t have a post called “Anchor Text SEO Optimization” and name one of the Stallion All In One SEO keyphrases “Disney Porn”, you might go with “SEO of Anchor Text”, “Anchor Text SEO”, “How to SEO Anchor Text” which are likely to be phrases/keywords also used in the content of the article.

I’d have no problem explaining to a reasonable person why I’d want to use those phrases this way. I can argue by mixing up the anchor text of different links etc… visitors might see something they are interested in via one of the phrases, but not in another, maybe “How to SEO Anchor Text” in a section of the article they are looking for, but just reading “Anchor Text SEO Optimization” for all the links isn’t enough to peak their interest. Even Google search doe this now, if the algorithm thinks a header is a better title it will be shown on SERPs. Also if I were manually creating these links etc… rather than having Stallion generate them I wouldn’t naturally use the exact same text every time, so I’m trying to mimic how I’d naturally link to my content if every page was a single HTML page not trying to game Google.

Now add randomness to the equation, why not randomly select the All In One SEO Keyphrases on each page load and why not increase the number of keyphrases to 20 or 30, so every time a user (including searching engine spider) visits a page it’s changed, not for their benefit, but to randomly change the anchor text so Google doesn’t always see the same anchor text. Try explaining this to a reasonable manual Google reviewer :-)

Could you explain why the categories linked to change on each page load and the anchor text of the categories change as well? That’s why I wouldn’t do this, too SEO risky. In reality there’s not that much difference, but the intention is different.

Many years ago I setup a little script on some sites that would randomly load X number of links from a database of links, had around 100 links in the database. Added this to a lot of Amazon thin affiliate sites and it meant I had tens of thousands of pages with randomly generated links to my sites, wasn’t a good idea in hindsight and I would have had problems explaining what that isn’t SEO greyhat :-) Now I manually add links to sites, more work, but far safer.

Also randomly changing anchor text means Google will change your SERPs for both the pages the links are on and to. The Stallion WordPress SEO widget can generate a random posts widget and I use it, I can strongly argue this is for non-SEO reasons (slightly damaging SEO wise because the backlinks aren’t stable).

What I’d like to do is something similar to your idea, but no randomness. Basically have say three titles for a Category and have by default title 1 is used on home and all archives, title 2 on posts and pages and title 3 on everything else. Would also try to use the phrases within the category archives as well. Easy to say, hard to code :-)

If I could add this concept (which is an extension of the Stallion All In One Keyphrases) to the home page link, categories, tags, blogroll links etc… it would reduce the number of each instance of a particular anchor text usage. This is thinking out loud stage, not sure if it’s possible yet. really want to add something for the blogroll, don’t like all those sitewide links and adding links on a page by page basis is a lot of work.

David