Google: we try to pick the most relevant anchor texts from your internal links

In a webmaster hangout on YouTube, Google’s John Mueller said that Google tries to pick the most relevant anchor text if you link with different texts to the same page on your website:

“It’s not always the case that there’s only one link to one URL within a website or on a page. With regards to the anchor text, we try to pick the one that is the most relevant for that link to understand the context of that link best.

That’s something where I wouldn’t blindly focus on like ‘the first one on the page has to be the one that has the longest anchor text with all of the keywords on it.’ We try to understand the context of these pages and the way they’re linked internally and I think for the most part that works out fairly well.”

What is an anchor text?

The visible, clickable text in a link to a website is called anchor text. By default, the anchor text underlined and blue (although most websites change the design of their links).

Here’s an example: <a href=”http://www.example.com”>This is the anchor text</a>

Search engines use anchor texts to find out what a website is about. If many other websites link to a page on your website with the link text “blue widgets” then it’s likely that the linked page is relevant to the search term “blue widgets”.

Further information about the importance of the links on your own website can be found here.

How to analyze external anchor texts

It’s easy to change the anchor texts on your own website. However, the anchor texts that are used on other websites to link to your website have a much bigger influence on the rankings of your website than the anchor texts of your internal links.

The Link Profiler tool in SEOprofiler helps you to analyze the anchor texts that are used to link to your website (as well as the anchor texts that are used to link to other websites).

Just enter your domain name in the Link Profiler tool will show you the most popular anchor texts that are used to the website (on the ‘Anchor texts’ page). You can also search for particular anchor texts in the links, you can search for linking web pages that contain particular words in the title, and much more.

Analyze the anchor texts of any website

The Link Profiler tool is also available in the free demo version of SEOprofiler. You can create your free SEOprofiler account here:

Analyze links

Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.