Anchor Text
Anchor
Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In modern browsers, it is
often blue and underlined, such as this link to the moz homepage
Code
Sample
<a href="http://www.example.com">Example Anchor Text</a>
Optimal
Format
SEO-friendly
anchor text is succinct and relevant to the target page.
What is
Anchor Text?
Anchor
text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking
to another document or location on the web. In the phrase "CNN is a
good source of news, but I actually prefer the BBC's take on events," two unique pieces
of anchor text exist for two different links: "CNN" is the anchor
text pointing to http://www.cnn.com/, while “the BBC's take on events” points
to http://news.bbc.co.uk.
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 "CNN", Moz.com thinks that http://www.cnn.com/
is a relevant site for the term "CNN" and that http://www.bbc.co.uk
is relevant to “the BBC's take on events.” 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.
In the
example above, "Jon Wye's Custom Designed Belts" would be the anchor
text of this link.
SEO
Best Practice
As
search engines have matured, they have started identifying more metrics
for determining rankings. One metric that stood out among the rest was
link relevancy. Link relevancy is determined by both the content of the source
page and the content of the anchor text. It is a natural phenomenon that occurs
when people link out to other content on the web.
This is
most easily understood with an example. Imagine that someone writes a blog
about whiteboard markers. Ever inclined to learn more about their passion, they
spend part of their day reading what other people online have to say about
whiteboard markers. Now imagine that while reading on their favorite topic, the
dry erase marker enthusiast finds an article about the psychological effects of
marker color choice. Excited, she goes back to her website to blog about the
article so her friends can read about it.
When
she writes the blog post and links to the article, she gets to choose the
anchor text for the link pointing at the article. She could choose something
like “click here,” but more likely, she will choose something that it is
relevant to the article. In this case, she chooses “psychological effects of
marker color choice.” Someone else who links to the same article might use the
link anchor text, "marker 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 unbiased
and produced by 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 hierarchy.
For example, the search engines can also use the fact that someone linked to
the whiteboard marker article from a blog about whiteboard markers 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.
With
the Penguin update, Google began to look more closely at keywords in anchor
text. If too many of a site's inbound links contain the exact same anchor text,
it can start to appear suspicious, and is often a sign that the links weren’t
acquired naturally. In general, it’s still a best practice to obtain keyword–
and topic–specific anchor text when possible. However, SEOs may get better
results by striving for a variety of anchor text rather than the same keyword
each time.
Key
Points:
- If many links
point to a page with the right keywords in their anchor text, that page
has a very good chance of ranking well. Real examples of this include the
search engine result pages for the queries, "click here" and
"leave." Many of the Google results for these queries rank
solely due to the anchor text of inbound links.
- People have a
tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either the domain
name or the title of the page. This is an advantage to SEOs who include
keywords they want to rank for in these two elements.
- Too many inbound
links to a page with the exact same keyword-rich anchor text may cause
Google to scrutinize that site’s link profile more closely; using
manipulative methods to acquire keyword–rich anchor text is not
recommended.
Importance
of the First Anchor Text
Moz
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.
More
recently, several webmasters have run experiments showing ways to count multiple anchor text phrases contained on
the same page and pointing to the same target. This is accomplished by creating
anchors on the target page and linking to those anchors using hashtags, such as
the way Moz links to blog post comments:
<a href="../blog/example-post#jtc142864">Second
Anchor Text</a>
Related
Tools
- MozBar
The MozBar SEO toolbar lets you see relevant metrics in your browser as you surf the web. - Open
Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer is a free tool that gives webmasters the ability to analyze up to 10,000 links to any site or page on the web via the Mozscape web index.
External
Resources
- The
Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
The original PageRank algorithm research paper written by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. - Webmaster
Guidelines
Google's Official Guidelines for Webmasters. - Text
Links and PageRank
Head of the Webspam Team at Google, Matt Cutts', thoughts on hyperlinks in relation to SEO and Google.
Related
Guides
No comments:
Post a Comment