Anchor text is the clickable, human- or assistive-technology-readable text attached to a hyperlink — the words a reader actually sees and a screen reader announces when a link is present.
| Term | Anchor Text |
|---|---|
| Category | Entities, Links and Authority |
| Also known as | Link Text |
| Where it appears | Content Report → Anchor text |
What it means in RankGear
RankGear surfaces anchor text in the Content Report, where it catalogs the wording used for the links on a page rather than just the destination URLs. Because anchor text is the label a reader and a search engine both read to predict what sits on the other end of a link, RankGear treats it as descriptive evidence about how a page connects itself to entities, topics, and other pages. When an external provider is enabled for a run, that link-and-entity view can be enriched with referring domains, backlink counts, and authority indicators, letting you see anchor wording alongside the surrounding link context instead of in isolation.
How to interpret it
Read anchor text as a signal of relevance and intent, not as a dial you turn to gain rank. Descriptive wording that names the destination (“anchor text best practices”) tells a reader and a crawler more than a bare “click here” or a raw URL. When you compare pages, keep provider availability separate from the measured value: any authority or entity figures attached to those links come from a provider’s own index, so only compare wording and link metrics among pages captured under the same run conditions. The point is to understand how a page describes its links, then judge whether that description is honest and useful.
Example
You open the Content Report for an article on running shoes and see that most outbound links use the anchor “read more,” while a competitor’s page that outranks it links out with anchors like “carbon-plate midsole tests” and “World Athletics stack-height rules.” The competitor’s wording tells both readers and search engines exactly what each link leads to. Rewriting your generic anchors to name their destinations makes the page easier to navigate and gives crawlers a clearer map of the topics it references.
Important considerations
- Anchor text describes what a link points to; it is not a Google ranking score, and rewording links does not by itself make a page rank.
- Provider metrics attached to links use different indexes and scales. They are comparative indicators, not Google’s own numbers, so treat them as relative evidence rather than absolute truth.
- Comparative findings — “ranking pages tend to use descriptive anchors” — are correlations drawn from the pages RankGear examined, not proof that the wording causes the ranking.
- Over-optimized, repetitive exact-match anchors can read as manipulation; natural, varied wording that genuinely describes each destination is the more durable practice.
- Anchor text also carries accessibility weight: it should describe the target on its own, since screen-reader users may hear links out of their surrounding context.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.