I ran tests on my testing servers – all eight of them and carefully selected domains from the 500+ I have available. Filter or bug, my conclusions laid out a method which is just good webmastering in my view.

Problem: Through link building or through paid links, the targeted keyword phrase has a very high percentage of the overall incoming anchor text, often in the 50-60% range.

This, of course, looks highly unnatural. Here is what I am recommending in order for your link campaigns to look more natural.

Step One: Run a report for your most profitable keyword phrases over the last 60 days.

Step Two: Use SpyFu, or look at your PPC account and assign each of the keywords a dollar value per click. It doesn’t matter if you only target organic traffic. We must have dollar figures assigned. Start with your most profitable keyword phrase. Any phrase with a value of $.94 or above, write it down. Continue until you have five keyword phrases. Why 94 cents and above? That was the range of keywords which suffered the penalty.

Step Three: Analyze your incoming anchor text. I use SEO Elite to make the job easy. Analyze the links for your target page and choose all the search engines. I like to check the "Show Unique Results" so I don’t get a lot of garbage. Once the analysis on the page is complete, enter your targeted keyword phrases in the Keyword area (bottom left on the Report Tab screen). Any phrase which is 56% or higher is a potential problem. This is the range where problems were seen most often. This is NOT an absolute number as we are only analyzing unique data and not considering possible multiple links and also Run of Site (ROS) links which would, of course, put the percentages a lot higher or lower depending on the anchor text being analyzed.

Step Four: "Dilute" your incoming link text with additional links. You will do this by using non-keyword anchor text which will help stabilize the anchor text scale.

• Use the full URL for the link text: http://www.domain.com/webpage.html.
• Use the actual company name, product name, owner’s name, etc. (as long as it isn’t a focused keyword phrase).
• Use Google Sets to come up with additional terms to use.
• Look at the other anchor text used in the SEO Elite report and also in your Google Webmaster Central account.
• Run SEO Elite on the #1 result for your targeted phrase and look to see which phrases or text they are targeting besides the terms you are. This can allow you to expand your reach and have a better understanding of how they are doing their linking campaign.

Step Five: Analyze pages where you will place these new links. Before you invest in a directory submission, link exchange, or even post a request for your link to appear, make sure the page is getting spidered by Google. You can do this simply with the "cache command":

cache:domain.com/webpage.html

If the cache date is older than 30 days, the page is most likely in the Supplemental Index (yes, it still exists) and won’t be beneficial to you regardless of what the PageRank says on the Toolbar (you should know that the PageRank on the Google Toolbar isn’t accurate).

Step Six: Double or triple the links you estimate you need. Why? We all know not all links are scored and used by Google. By doubling the number, you ensure you will achieve your goal.

Example: I’ll use my site, webmarketingnow.com … and I will just use the home page and the keyword phrase "web marketing".

Here are the steps I would take in SEO Elite:

1) Choose Option 1 "Analyze backlinks using a specified search engine".
2) Enter your domain name.
3) The slider should be moved to the far right, set to "1000".
4) Choose all the search engines (this will ensure you get a really good capture of your external links).
5) Only mark "Show Unique Results" and "Skip All Onpage Links".

The incoming anchor text is 68.9% which is too high.

1) After the report finishes, click the REPORTS tab.
2) Sort by Anchor text to see the groupings.
3) To check the percentages of the different anchor text, click "Add Keywords…"

So, what anchor text should be injected in order to dilute this figure? I want to be able to do this quickly and test the results, so I’m going to say I need 25 additional links, so we’ll target a total of 50. Running the numbers, this isn’t enough to get the percentage down to 56%, but since we’re doing five keyword phrases, that is a total of 250 links, which is more than enough to keep us busy. Let’s look to see what is being used on the page right now:

Let’s look at the data in Webmaster Central. Which keyword phrases are most used as incoming anchor text site wide? You find this under Statistics | What Googlebot sees:

What do we take from this?

#1 – web marketing now
#4 – http://www.webmarketingnow.com/
#5 – webmarketingnow
#6 – jerry west
#9 – web marketing
#10 – www.webmarketingnow.com
#11 – webmarketingnow.com

Okay, this is good data. The new links we’ll target with the URL as anchor text, I’ll use #4, #10 and #11, and I also think it is important to also add #5 in there too. Why? It already ranks #5, so it is a good idea to keep the percentages similar. There is an old saying, "If you want to look natural it is best to, well, look natural." So, look at how the breakdown of the incoming anchor text is currently and acquire your links in a similar fashion, but don’t just go down the list … do what I did, I picked 7 of the top 11. Be smart about it.

Now let’s look at the #1 site to see how the incoming anchor text differs (run the same report above in SEO Elite):

Check out those numbers. Only one-fourth of the incoming anchor text targets "web marketing". I would run this same report on positions 2-5 to get a collective number … and this should be my aim. So, let’s just say the 27.4% was the collective number, it would tell me my "incoming link density" is 40% higher than the collective number. This could, emphasis on could, be the reason the page is not in the Top Ten. I think I should also add "internet marketing" to the mix too, just for good measure.

But wait, we aren’t done yet. Let’s check out Google Sets so see if there is other anchor text I could use. I typed in: web marketing, online marketing, internet marketing, seo testing, seo research.

I chose "Large Set" and I get the following results:

From the results, the following would be good to add to my list of targeted anchor text:

• search engine optimization services
• search engine placement
• search engine positioning
• affiliate marketing

Okay, with the target of 50 links, here is my game plan:

Don’t laugh at the last one. We have to do at least one or two "stupid links"  to make this a real "natural" method, don’t we?

There you go. That is a complete rundown on how to make sure your most important pages aren’t "top heavy" with your anchor text. Doing the above will help you avoid this new penalty and should improve your rankings as well.

Regardless of how long you have been an SEO, Webmaster or Online Marketer, I can safely assume you have never used the tools in the manner I outlined above. This is exactly what the SEO Rainmaker conference is all about. Using the tools you have right now in ways you didn’t consider. The result is a positive impact on your business.

Join David Bullock and I in Orlando Memorial Day Weekend (May 24-25) and learn How to Become an SEO Rainmaker.