If you have spent any time working on search optimization, novice to guru (ha ha), then you have spent some time worrying about anchor text. Inc Magazine has an answer for you: just link the entire page to itself. The image above is an accident, I assume because it has been corrected, but for a while the entirety of this post was a link back to itself.
When it comes to anchor text that is too much (710 words).
So what should you be looking for? When you control the link and you want to do “the right thing” you should be linking with an appropriate description of the content that you are linking to like: filtering mail in Google Analytics. If you need a full sentence to describe a link something is suspect — both as a reader and for the search engines.
One Comment
I think it’s safe to assume that 710 words of anchor text was a mistake - although I’m sure the SEOs in charge of major websites in the upper traffic brackets play with all sorts of things we don’t notice on an average day. They’ve got so much attention from the bots - they can go from SEO theory to fact in less than a day (links from other websites being the exception, of course). When it comes to internal PageRank distribution I’d assume a site like Inc.com is able to see the effects almost in real time after making a change to anchor text or other factors. Reason enough to play around and see what the deal is.
For conventional purposes, though - I’d assume linking 710 words won’t help you much (and certainly won’t make for a great user experience). When it comes to search engines, though, I almost always find that what seems like an obvious spam filter trigger ends up either unnoticed or rewarded.