Overview
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 main Wikipedia page might take this form:The anchor text in this example is Wikipedia; the complex URL http://www.wikipedia.org displays on the web page as Wikipedia, contributing to a clean, easy to read text or document.
Common misunderstanding of the concept
Webmasters sometimes tend to misunderstand anchor text. Instead of turning appropriate words inside of a sentence into a clickable link, webmasters frequently insert extra text such as this:- Today our president has broken another treaty. To know more, click here.
- Today our president has broken another treaty
This proper method of linking is beneficial not only to users, but also to the webmaster as anchor text holds significant weight in search engine rankings. Most search engine optimization experts recommend against using "click here" to designate a link.
Search engine algorithms
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 is, 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.
In the past, Google bombing has been possible through anchor text manipulation; however, in January, 2007, Google announced it had updated its algorithm to minimize the impact of Google bombs.
References
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Friday July 18, 2008 at 19:01:10 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
Copyright © 2008, Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.