As most readers of this site will know it is just a little test site I use for testing, waffling, posting news, spoof posting and general blogging.
It’s recently started ranking well for a number of SEO related phrases and was top 10 for things like SEO, SEO Services, SEO Tips, SEO Advice etc.
This gave me a little idea 
There is a lot of talk on SEO forums and blogs at the moment about how having too many links pointing to a site using the same anchor text can have a negative effect.
With this in mind I decided to do a new little SEO test and point 150,000+ links to the homepage of V1 SEO using the anchor text SEO Services
2 weeks later, there was no real change so I thought I would switch it up a bit so set 500,000 links up using SEO services as the anchor text and SEO as an alt attribute of an image linking to V1 SEO
Within a week the fact the site now had too many links with same anchor text it suddenly lost all rankings for most SEO related keyword.
This isn’t clear proof that too many links using the same anchor text can have a negative effect, as it wasn’t really a controlled experiment and the site providing the majority of links is in the same Webmaster Tools control panel as V1 SEO, has the same author tags and is linked to from V1 SEO and so forming a connection.
Interesting little experiment though, next time I may try it on 2 totally unrelated sites and see if I can knock that out the Google rankings too.
Fascinating experiment Terry.
It would be interesting to see what happens if the links are left in place a little longer to see if the impact is permanent or just temporary indigestion until G works out the connection.
I’m sure this is why some of the larger agencies are languishing in pages 4 to 10 for some of the big terms. They’ve just over-egged their anchor text and are now stuck with an unnatural link profile.
Trouble is with back links, they’re like a tattoo. If only there were an effective Bad Back Link Removal Service!!!
I’ve taken the links back down for quite some time now but webmaster tools shows no sign of them going, be interesting to see if the pages just recover on their own.
Meanwhile, I’ve got some experiments running on another site, but this time targeting an internal page rather than the home page for SEO Services, bit of a strange site with a bit of bad history behind it, but will be interesting to see if it ranks or not
Keep an eye out for my profile image and then watch it bomb again
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so many questions….
500,000 links ? WTF!!!
.. and you have taken them all down already! When do you sleep?
Welcome to the wonderful world of “Negative SEO” ?
Ok, I had one question in my mind. What if there is a NEW Website around say 1 year old. Which has done directory submission & has used same anchor text (Say BRAND ANCHOR TEXT) in all the directories. And majority of its back links are coming from directory. Will it be negative ??