Anchor Text
The visible, clickable words of a link, which tell the engine what the destination is about.
Analogy Mental model
A road sign. Destination in five hundred metres is nearly useless; the name of the station is what you need.
In practice What you actually do
Internal anchors should describe the target: how to adjust coffee brewing temperature, not read more. External anchors should vary across brand, bare URL, partial match and generic phrasing, because that mixture is what an unmanaged profile looks like.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
A hundred inbound links where ninety read best running shoes is not a signal, it is a signature. That pattern has triggered link penalties for over a decade, and it is the easiest thing for an auditor to spot.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →