Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Anchor text
Summary
The anchor text, link label or link text is the visible, clickable text in an HTML hyperlink. The term "anchor" was used in older versions of the HTML specification for what is currently referred to as the a element, or . The HTML specification does not have a specific term for anchor text, but refers to it as "text that the a element wraps around". In XML terms (since HTML is XML), the anchor text is the content of the element, provided that the content is text.
Usually, web search engines analyze anchor text from hyperlinks on web pages. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive from search engines. Other services apply the basic principles of anchor text analysis as well. For instance, academic search engines may use citation context to classify academic articles, and anchor text from documents linked in mind maps may be used too.
Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link's destination. The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, a hyperlink to the English-language Wikipedia's homepage might take this form:
Wikipedia
"Wikipedia" is the anchor text in this example. The URL it points to is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. The entire hyperlink appears on a web page as .
Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps, as the tendency was, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page. Anchor text can also serve the purpose of directing the user to internal pages on the site, which can also help to rank the website higher in the search rankings.
Webmasters may use anchor text to procure high results in search engine results pages.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.