What Google Suggests About Link Text

Is the word “Link Text” new for you? Have you ever heard about it? This is a new term coined by Google recently. What we call “Anchor Text”, Google calls it “Link Text”. So it’s the same clickable word or phrase with a hyperlink in a document. Hope now it’s clear for all of you.

Importance of Link Text

We all are very aware about the importance of link text and how Google considers it in its search ranking algorithm. It is helpful for users as well as search engines to clearly understand the contents of the target page. Also it helps search engines to find its correlation with other similar pages.

What Google Suggests About Link Text

Google suggests webmasters to use descriptive & relevant text in link text which is useful & understandable for users as well as search engines.

Google is also suggesting not to use generic link text like click here, learn more, click this, right here etc for descriptive text. Instead you should use some descriptive texts that correlate with the content of the target page.

How To Optimize Your Link Text

It’ll be difficult to optimize their link texts directly, so it’s best to revise the surrounding sentence to make link text descriptive. Google has given one example of how to do it.

Best Practices for Link Text – By Google

Google has listed some best practices for link text which could be the best resource for webmasters. Check it out now and take the advantages in Google search.

What Webmasters Should Do Now

As Google is suggesting to use descriptive texts in links texts rather than just some generic texts, it’s giving a clear indication to webmasters that they must not ignore it & must focus on optimizing their link text, whether it is internal or external.

How To Find Your Generic Link Texts

First of all it’s important to find out generic link texts from your website and to optimize it. Finding such generic link texts can be a huge task. It’ll be difficult to find out all your such link texts from a single resource.

You can try with various tools like Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, Majestic, Link Research Tools etc to download all your backlinks along with your link texts and filtering for such issues is time taking.

The best resource to find such links texts is Google itself. You can use Google’s Lighthouse Chrome Plug-in to find such issues. It’ll give you results like below-

So webmasters may download the lighthouse plug-in to find & fix such issues.

Even the lighthouse plug-in can help webmasters to find other SEO issues of a website. Lighthouse will give pagewise data whereas other tools like Ahrefs etc will give you site-wide link data.

You can find the support page for link texts from Google at https://web.dev/link-text/.

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Diptimayee Mohanty

She is the founder & director of SUVAANCE Internet Marketing Services Pvt. Ltd. From mere interest to full time career, she delved into the world of digital marketing in later part of last decade and has been contributing excellent articles on Google algorithm changes, patents, SEO strategies, tools & software for marketing and analysis.

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