The anchor text, link label or link text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines. Since 1998, some web browsers have added the ability to show a tooltip for a hyperlink before it is selected. Not all links have anchor texts because it may be obvious where the link will lead due to the context in which it is used. Anchor texts normally remain below 60 characters. Different browsers will display anchor texts differently. Usually, Web Search Engines analyze anchor text from hyperlinks on web pages. However, also other services apply the basic principles of anchor text analysis. For instance, academic search engines may use citation context to classify academic articles,[1] and anchor text from documents linked in mind maps may be used too.[2]
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Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link's destination. The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, a hyperlink to the English-language Wikipedia's homepage might take this form:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a>The anchor text in this example is "Wikipedia"; the unwieldy URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page displays on the web page as Wikipedia, contributing to clean, easy-to-read text.
This proper method of linking is beneficial to users and webmasters as anchor text holds significant weight in search engine rankings. The limit of the concept is building sentences only composed with linked words.
Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps, as the tendency was, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page.
Webmasters may use anchor text to procure high results in search engine results pages. Google's Webmaster Tools facilitate this optimization by letting website owners view the most common words in anchor text linking to their site.[3] In the past, Google bombing was possible through anchor text manipulation; however, in January, 2007, Google announced it had updated its algorithm to minimize the impact of Google bombs.[4]