Anchor text or link label is defined as “a clickable text in hyperlink” that are mainly used by SEO services providers to generate backlinks to a website. Search engines ideally use the keywords in the anchor texts to determine the ranking the web page will receive by various search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Having said that, it is better to use an anchor text that is relevant to the page it is linking to rather than having some generic text.
As per the web standard, a common anchor text will be shown in blue with an underline. However, you can change the color and underline of the text using HTML coding. Furthermore, if there are any links on the website without anchor text, they are known as URL anchor texts or naked URLs. Some of the terms associated with anchor text are described below
Anchor Text Variation
A large portion of links on the internet is usually naked URLs. This is because if all the web pages that link to your website have exactly the same anchor text, a Google spam filter will be triggered detecting it unnatural. That is why professional SEO services recommend anchor text variation with respect to long tail keywords.
Backlink Anchor Text
A backlink is defined as “the link from another website” and a backlink anchor text is defined as “the anchor texts used by other websites linking to your website”. These anchor texts or link labels will help the search engines to determine and verify the keyword relevancy that a web page must have, and then rank the page accordingly.
One-Way Anchor Text Backlinks
If one website links to another website using an anchor text backlink and the latter website does not link back to the former one, it is known as one-way anchor text backlinks. If a web page has a few one-way anchor text backlinks from a website with high rank on Google or Bing, that web page is believed to rank better on the search engine.
Excessive Anchor Text
A case of excessive anchor text occurs when there are many keywords in a page linking to various other web pages or the same page but with different anchor texts. This is considered as a “user-unfriendly” method and the search engines may even penalize you for this.
Spammy Anchor Text
If an anchor text on a page has no relation to the page on the website it is linking to, it is considered as a spammy anchor text. This is used mainly to make a temporary hike in web page ranking or to harm the website of competitors by doing negative SEO.
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