Vary Your Links’ Descriptions, Or Else

I think most good SEOs have been varying link descriptions for some time now. It’s just another thing we can do to make our links look "natural". Admittedly I’ve never been one to use 100 descriptions when I get 100 links — but I would try to use 5 or 10 variations, for instance.

This is one of those SEO methods that we say is forward-looking. I.e., in 2001 when a lot of people did this, you better believe it didn’t matter. It really didn’t. But as long as you’re building links, why not build links that will probably still help in 5 years?

5 years later, it matters. I just came across this WMW thread [supporters only -- riffraff, keep out], where Robert Charlton says:

At SES, in the search engines’ linking session, Matt Cutts was very explicit that Google looks at the uniqueness of descriptions when evaluating links. For a bunch of reasons outside the scope of this thread, I’m very much inclined to believe him.

In other words: showing links with many duplicate descriptions is almost certainly evidence of aggressive link building, and it appears Google is filtering / devaluing those links. Note: MSN probably isn’t. But they may in 2007

Bottom line: if you aren’t already, start varying your links’ descriptions!