What Is Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text. The anchor is usually made up of one or a few clickable words, underlined and colored. The blue, underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard, although it is possible to change the color and underline 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. Just to keep things clear, there is a hidden backlink under an anchor text, and it’s an essential part of off-page SEO we’re going to talk about today.

The role of this on-page element is to connect two topically related sources with each other in order to supplement a specific page with extra information and finish the topic up. Search engines count anchor text as a relevancy factor, and use it to categorize both linking and linked-to websites.

Anchor text example:

 “Capsaicin stimulates the release of endorphins in your body.”

The part “stimulates the release of endorphins” is an anchor text and leads to this blog post → https://helix.northwestern.edu/blog/2014/07/your-brain-capsaicin. 

On the HTML side of a page, the link looks like this:

<a href=https://helix.northwestern.edu/blog/2014/07/your-brain-capsaicin>stimulates the release of endorphins</a>

Links without anchor text commonly happen on the web and are called naked URLs, or URL anchor texts. Different browsers will display anchor text differently, and proper use of anchor text can help the page linked to rank for those keywords in search engines.

Natural Anchor Text

Natural anchor texts are created organically by users without any interference and control of a webmaster who owns or manages a linked-to site. These anchors usually differ between each other – which is good – and they are always relevant to a source.

People tend to link to content using the anchor of either the domain name or the title of the page. That’s good for your website’s SEO. However, naturally acquired anchors can be useless to SEO too. For instance, when a user adds a naked URL pointing to your page, no SEO value is obtained.

Natural Anchor Text vs Unnatural Anchor Text

When web surfers link to your 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 your website, create good content and the links and anchor text should come naturally.