A Data Driven Guide To Anchor Text (And Its Impact On SEO)
There’s a lot of information out there about anchor text.
But depending on which guide you read, you might think that you should:
a) Build lots of anchor text rich links to shoot your site to the top of Google!
b) Avoid building any anchor text links or you’ll be banned forever from search and put on an FBI watch list!
So which is true?
Well, like many things in SEO, the truth lies somewhere in between. So today we’re going to deep dive into the topic and, as usual, rely on data (rather than opinion) to form our conclusions.
Let’s start by defining exactly what anchor text is and how it influences search rankings.
What Is Anchor Text?
Anchor text refers to the visible, clickable words used to link one web page to another.
Let’s say Ahrefs published an article that we wanted to rank for the keyword “marketing toolset”. Here are some of the ways that other websites might choose to link to us:
Exact Match — the anchor text is the exact keyword phrase we are looking to rank our article for:
Ahrefs is a data-driven marketing toolset powered by a huge index of backlinks, keywords and content.
Partial Match/Phrase Match – the anchor text contains the keyword phrase we are looking to rank for:
Ahrefs is a data-driven marketing toolset powered by a huge index of backlinks, keywords and content.
Branded — the anchor text is the name of our brand:
Ahrefs is a data-driven marketing toolset powered by a huge index of backlinks, keywords and content.
Naked URLs — the anchor text is a ‘naked’ URL (i.e. as it would appear in a browser):
Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com) is a data-driven marketing toolset powered by a huge index of backlinks, keywords and content.
Generic — the anchor text is an unspecific, generic phrase which does not include our target keyword (i.e. ‘click here’, ‘this site’, ‘this article’)
Ahrefs is a data-driven marketing toolset powered by a huge index of backlinks, keywords and content. Click here to go to their site.
LSI Keywords — the anchor text is a synonym for, or closely related to our target keyword.
Ahrefs is a data-driven promotional toolset powered by a huge index of backlinks, keywords and content.
Other types of anchors include:
Author — your name would be the anchor.
Title Tag — your page title is the anchor. Often these will also be partial match.
Image links — the alt text may be counted as the anchor.
By running the “Anchors” report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, we can see that several of the anchor text types listed above have been used to link to our SEO tips article.