The Importance of Anchor Text in Back-links

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. The anchor text is relevant to the page that is linked to, rather than the generic text. The blue, underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard, although it is possible to change the color and underlining through html code. The keywords in anchor text are one of the many signals search engines use to determine the topic of a web page. The anchor text is also known as the link label or link title. The more links, the merrier. Each link consequently comes with an anchor text. The words contained in the anchor text help in determining the ranking that a page will receive by search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Links in the absence of anchor text mostly happens on the web and therefore called URL anchor texts or naked URLs. Various browsers display anchor text differently, and the proper use of an anchor text helps the page that is linked to rank for those keywords in search engines. The anchor text is the clickable text that we see within the content of the website and once we click on it we will be directed to another page. It is the visible and clickable text in a hyperlink that is displayed on a webpage. Look how a sample anchor text will look like in the source code of a website:

For example: <a href=”http://cosmowhiz.wpengine.com”>IN digital marketing agency</a>

However, as users, we can see only the clickable part of the anchor text: IN digital marketing agency. If we want to ‘dissect’ the elements that constitute the anchor text structure:

• <a> and </a> = beginning and end of link tag.
• http://cosmowhiz.wpengine.com = link referral location.
• IN digital marketing agency = anchor text.

In modern browsers, it is often blue and underlined, such as this link to the cosmowhiz homepage. Recently, Google has announced that it will gradually reduce its dependence on anchor text until it has minimal effect. Lots of sources have given infographs about the future of SEO factors – and it clearly shows that anchor text is in rapid decline.

An exact match anchor text has the same keywords highlighted as the targeted keyword of a web page. For example: An exact match anchor text on this page would be the keyword “anchor text” hyperlinked to www.cosmowhiz.com/anchortext like so: anchor text. When sites aggressively build exact matched anchor text links, a Google spam filter is triggered. It is concoted for web pages that are linked to your website to have all exact match anchor text. A bit of anchor text variation is natural, just like how a great quantum of the internet’s links are naked URLs.

Search engines use this text to help determine the subject matter of the linked-to document. In the example above, the links would tell the search engine that when users search for “cosmowhiz”, then that http://cosmowhiz.wpengine.com/ is a relevant site for the term “cosmowhiz” and that http://cosmowhiz.wpengine.com is not relevant to “the projects of cosmowhiz.” If many sites think that a particular page is relevant for a given set of terms, that page can manage to rank well even if the terms NEVER appear in the text itself. As search engines have matured, they have started identifying more metrics to determine rankings. Link Relevancy was one such metric that stood out among the rest. It is determined by both the content of the source page and the content of the anchor text. It is a universal anomaly that occurs when people link out to other content on the web. This can be easily understood with an example. Imagine someone writing a blog about painting colors. Ever inclined to learn more about their passion, they spend part of their day reading what other people online have to say about painting colors. Now imagine that while reading on their favorite topic, the paint color maniac finds an article about the psychological effects of painting colors’ color choice. Excited, the blogger goes back to his/her website to blog about the article so that his/her friends can read about it. When he/she writes the blog post and links it to the article, he/she gets to choose the anchor text for the link pointing at the article. He/She could choose something like “click here,” but more likely, he/she will choose something that it is relevant to the article. In this case, he/she chooses “psychological effects of painting colors color choice.” Someone else who links to the same article might use the link anchor text, “paint color choice and its effect on the brain.” This human–powered information is essential to modern-day search engines. The search engines can use it to determine what the target page is about and thus, which queries it should be relevant for. These descriptions are relatively impartial and brought by the real people. This metric, in combination with complicated natural language processing, makes up the lion’s share of link relevancy indicators online.

Other important link relevancy indicators are link sources and information echelons. For example, the search engines can also use the fact that someone linked to the painting color article from a blog about painting colors to supplement their algorithm’s understanding of the given page’s relevancy. Similarly, the engines can use the fact that the original article was located at the URL www.example.com/vision/color/ to determine the high-level positioning and relevancy of the content.

The anchor title is the tool-tip text that appears whenever you mouse-over on a link. The importance and weight of the anchor title is not really as big as the anchor text – but it is one of the most visible factors describing the link and what it is pointing to. Although anchor text is still an important relevancy factor in SEO, over the years Google Bots have become smarter and are now able to detect the relevance of a website based on keywords, synonyms and the title tag alone. As outlined by a Moz.com Post-Penguin Anchor Text Case Study, backed up by Quicksprout.com, websites no longer need numerous optimized anchor text in order to rank well in the search engines. It is just enough to just have 6-10 links with a broad range of mixed anchor text with some of the main keywords. Moz’s experiments have shown that if two links are targeting the same URL, only the anchor text used in the first link is counted by Google. For example, if I wanted to rank for a term such as “buy pizza” on BuyPizza.co.in then I might have links with the following anchor text:

• BuyPizza.co.in
• http://www.buypizza.co.in
• Click here
• Website.com
• Buying pizza
• This site
• Where to buy pizza
• Pizza store
• Click here to buy pizza
• Buying pizza online

When web surfers link to a website, it is inevitable that you will get bad anchor text that does not help identify your web page’s topic. However, just like naked URLs, these are natural occurrences, and are not frowned upon by search engines. On the flip side, the lack of naked URLs, the excessive use of anchor text, and or a high number of targeted one-way anchor text backlinks are all signs of unnatural anchor text distribution. Search engines like Google may penalize websites that focus on manipulating anchor text when user experience is compromised. To obtain natural anchor text links to the website, good content should be created and hence the links and anchor text will come naturally. When you are working on your internal link building strategy the following should be avoided:

• Do not use zero anchor texts, such as ‘Click Here’…
• Do not use the same anchor text too many times as it will be perceived by search engines as a signal of manipulation for this key phrase.

As a result of being a search engine signal for relevancy, it is possible to over-optimize your links’ anchor text. SEO’s or link-builders trained and specialized in building links to a website, often control the anchor text from the links they build from other websites. These anchor texts are targeted – the keywords in the anchor text will match the targeted keyword of the page an SEO is trying to rank on.