Is Anchor Text For External Links Important?

Sep 24, 2007

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the text that comes between <a> and </a>; for instance, if you write <a href=”http://www.contentblog.net”>content writing blog</a> then content writing blog is your anchor text and it in the link it looks like content writing blog.

What is the importance of anchor text?

Anchor text helps people understand what the link signifies. In the above example the anchor text clearly says that the link takes you to a content writing blog. This helps both you, the reader, and the search engines. When the search engines are crawling your page and when they come across the link having a particular anchor text, they know what the link signifies. It also tells the search engines that your web page gives so much importance to the words appearing as anchor text that you are using another link to give more information. Anchor text is beneficial for internal linking because you are directing the search engines to other, more specialized parts of your website. They can certainly help you in your SEO efforts.

Talking about SEO, the anchor text is quite valuable when it is coming from external links. If someone links to my blog and as anchor text he or she uses some keywords or expressions relevant to my blog I get SEO benefits for my blog for that anchor text. That’s why you should have meaningful page or blog post titles because people generally use the same title when they are linking to your blog or website. So this leads us to asking

Is anchor text for external links good for your SEO?

Suppose I’m linking to another content writing blog from my blog and I use the same phrase as anchor text; does it contribute something towards my SEO efforts? It doesn’t. But it is surely helping the other content writing blog and in this way, I’m not helping myself but my competing blog. So no, the anchor text that I use for outgoing links doesn’t help me, it helps the website I’m linking to.

Does this mean you shouldn’t use anchor text for external links?

Depends. Personally I don’t mind giving some SEO benefit to a competing blog. If you start manipulating your anchor text such that it doesn’t benefit the external website, it may trigger, justifiably, a reciprocal reaction: everybody will start avoiding meaningful anchor texts. The criteria for using the anchor text shouldn’t depend on what benefit it brings you or the external website; it should depend on the criticality of usability and accessibility.

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