This factor counts how many keyword-variation matches appear inside the destination URLs — the href values — of a page’s links. It is a raw occurrence count, not a quality score, and it relates to position within a measured result set rather than causing a ranking.
| Factor ID | RG-KWD-031 |
|---|---|
| Family | Keyword Usage & Density |
| Measurement | Variation occurrence count |
| Measured zone | Anchor destination URLs |
What it measures
This factor counts keyword-variation occurrences in the URL values of parsed links. Rather than looking at the visible anchor text, it reads where each link points — the destination URL in the href attribute — and tallies how many times a term from the keyword’s variation set appears inside those URLs across the page.
How RankGear measures it
RankGear parses every anchor from the script-free body (the page HTML with <script> content removed), reads each anchor’s destination URL, and sums case-insensitive whole-word variation matches. Longer terms are processed before shorter overlapping terms, so a segment already claimed by a longer match is not counted again by a shorter fragment of it.
What RankGear looks for
<a href="/marketing-automation-tools">See the tools</a>
<!-- href scanned; "marketing", "automation", "tools" matched whole-word -->How to optimize it
Link to clear, descriptive URLs when they genuinely represent relevant resources, and keep internal slugs readable and topic-aligned so the destination communicates what it is. Treat this figure as an observation of how your linking already reads, not a target to inflate — readable slugs help this metric as a byproduct of being useful, not the other way around.
Important considerations
- Repeated links to the same URL are counted repeatedly — the same slug linked five times contributes its matches five times.
- URL punctuation affects word-boundary matching, so hyphens, slashes, and query characters can join or split what counts as a whole word.
- External URLs can contribute to the value; matches are not limited to internal links.
- Do not rewrite stable URLs merely to increase this metric — changing established slugs risks broken links and lost equity for a number that only describes, and does not drive, position.
- This is a correlation-based signal measured within a result set; a higher count does not guarantee or cause a higher ranking.
Related factors
Part of the Factors reference · how RankGear measures · glossary.