Anchor Text

The visible, clickable words inside a hyperlink.

Definition

Anchor text is the readable text users click to follow a link. Search engines use it as a strong topical signal, so the words you and other sites use to link to a page heavily influence what that page ranks for.

Key points

• Healthy profiles mix branded, exact-match, partial-match, generic, and naked-URL anchors.
• Over-using exact-match anchors triggers Google's over-optimization filters.
• Branded anchors ("PositiveBacklink") are the safest default.