Google confirms that the anchor text of a hyperlink is a ranking signal for Google

Google’s John Mueller confirmed in a webmaster hangout on YouTube that the anchor texts of hyperlinks are a ranking signal for Google. Normal anchor texts help Google to rank a page for what the anchor text says about the page. Google is also able to ignore spam links that try to manipulate rankings:

Anchor links are an important ranking signal

John Mueller said that anchor texts are a ranking signal, and he said that Google can detect fake links:

“In general, when it comes to these kind of links, what we try to look at is the specific anchor text there.

So if it’s something where, when we look at it, it looks like, oh, it’s promoting this website in a way that it uses very keyword-rich anchor text, then that would be more problematic. If it’s essentially just linking to the URL or if it’s using the business name as something that is linking to the website name, then usually that’s less of an issue. […]

It’s very possible that we already ignore these specific links, because these are the kind of links that are very easy for our systems to pick up and say, well, we can just ignore those.”

You can view the full video here:

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Tom Cassy

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