Anchor Text

In this guide you’ll learn more about the Anchor Text section of the Link Explorer tool. If you need help understanding terminology used throughout the tools, please see our glossary.

Quick Links

• What is Anchor Text?
• Explore Anchor Text with Link Explorer
• View Top Links
• No Anchor Text
• Export Your Data
• Understanding Link Explorer Terminology

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. For example, take the link below. The blue, clickable text Learn More About Anchor Text, is the anchor text. It gives humans and search engines an idea of the content of the link. With the Anchor Text tab in Link Explorer you can analyze the phrases most commonly used as anchor text to link to your site and your competitors.

• Learn more about Anchor Text

To find anchor text for a site in Link Explorer, follow these steps from within the Anchor Text section:

1. Use the drop-down to select the scope of your search and see data for a root domain, subdomain, or exact page
2. Enter the site you'd like to research into the search box and click Analyze
3. You'll see a list of Anchor Text sorted by the number of Linking Domains which are linking to your site with that anchor text

Click the arrow in the Top Links column to the right to see the top links, based on Page Authority, that are using this anchor text. To see more links using this anchor text, click All followed links with this anchor text.

If you see [no anchor text], this simply means that there was not anchor text in the html code of that backlink.

To start exploring this further, click on the arrow in the Top Links column and then click All followed links with this anchor text.

You'll be redirected back to the Inbound Links section of the tool. Your Inbound Links report will be sorted based on the chosen anchor text. You can then add some more filters, and in a few clicks you'll be ready to export to CSV.

You can export your data to CSV using the button on the right. Once your report is ready, you can download it from the Export Notifications flag on the top right.

Please note: The number of rows you’re able to export from Link Explorer is dependent on your subscription level.

• Learn more about exporting link data from Link Explorer

More definitions are available in our Glossary.

Linking Domains (Total Linking Root Domains) - Number of unique root domains linking to a target. Two links from the same website will only be counted as one linking root domain.

Anchor Text- The visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.

Followed External Links - Links to the site from other sites that are followed (they do not have a "nofollow" tag added to the link).