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Evaluating Link Anchor Text

Updated over a year ago

📘 This article explains how to find the anchor text on internal links to your site's pages crawled by Botify to help you identify if these links can be optimized.

Overview

Semantic information associated with a page includes what links to the page say via their anchor text. A link's anchor text is the words users click to go to the page. Your internal links should accurately describe the content they point to, and they should be unique to provide users with diverse and relevant information about the linked content.

Creating a Link Anchor Text Report

To find incoming links' anchor text, navigate to the "Indexable/Non-Indexable URLs Distribution" chart in SiteCrawler's Distribution report:

anchortext_indexable.png

Click the Indexable chart section to view a URL Explorer report of only indexable pages to exclude pages you instructed search engines not to index.

anchors_report3.png

To find the anchor texts for these pages, add the following columns:

anchors_columns.png

  • No. of Inlinks: The number of incoming links for each page.

  • No. of Distinct Anchor Texts on Inlinks: The number of unique anchor texts found when evaluated against all incoming links.

  • Anchors on Inlinks (top 5): The values of most frequent anchor texts.

Click the down arrow in the column header to sort the list by the number of distinct anchor texts:

anchors_report.png

The first line in the table above shows:

  • The page has 1,128 links pointing to it (incoming links), including follow and nofollow links.

  • On all these links, 24 different types of anchor content are found

  • The anchor contents found most often are listed in the last column with the number of links they are on.

If you find some pages have no incoming link, it means the crawler only found them through a redirect. Use the following field to filter the report to exclude these: No. of Internal Inlinks > 0:

anchors_filterreport.png

You can export this report to get the list of all pages where you need to update links to the optimized pages.

Viewing Link Anchor Text by Individual Page

Three methods exist for viewing incoming link anchor text for a specific page:

  • Click AI URL Details link next to the URL in any URL Explorer result list, then navigate to the Inlinks page:
    ​

    anchors_individual.gif

  • Enter the full URL in the search box in the upper right corner of the page to view the URL Info page:
    ​

    anchors_urlpreview.png

  • Navigate to the page on your website with the Botify Chrome extension installed and click the Inlinks icon:

    anchors_chrome.png
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