Anchor Text

The anchor text is the words that appear in a link. For this reason it's also called the link text. The engines pay special attention to the anchor text, because it seems reasonable that if they finds a link to, say, how to buy a house, then the page being linked to is probably about how to buy a house.

Once I tested the power of anchor text by linking to a page with the anchor text "pancreas of fury". Soon the page I linked to was #1 in Google for a search on "pancreas of fury", even though the words "pancreas" and "fury" didn't appear anywhere on the page at all! It even outranked the page that contained the anchor text itself. (Don't bother searching for this page; I took it down long ago.)

The most famous exploit of anchor text was when bloggers teamed up to all link to George W. Bush's page using the anchor text "miserable failure". That's why when you search Google for "miserable failure" Bush's page comes up first. (Republicans retaliated by linking to Jimmy Carter's and Michael Moore's pages with that phrase to get those sites to show up as well.)

One way of trying to use anchor text to your advantage is with your navigation links. For example, instead of the link text "Home", you might use something like "Baby Bracelets Home", if your site sells baby bracelets. When other webmasters link to you, you can also see if you can get them to include your keywords as the anchor text.

Be warned that some consider anchor text to be an ingredient of the theoretical over optimization penalty mentioned above. The idea is that having a lot of backlinks with the same anchor text that's in the Title tag and all over the page triggers the penalty. While I don't know for sure whether this is the case, my feeling is that there is probably such a penalty but it's not a simple black and white issue, and it would be difficult to determine under exactly what circumstances it's triggered.