Anchor Text

Anchor text is the human-readable, clickable portion of a hyperlink — the underlined words a visitor sees rather than the raw URL. Search engines treat anchor text as a strong relevance signal: when hundreds of sites link to a domain using the phrase "cheap flight insurance," that pattern tells Google the destination page is authoritative on that topic, directly influencing its domain authority for related queries. The anchor text profile of a domain therefore shapes its footprint across every SERP where it competes. Over-optimized anchor text — for example, an unnatural concentration of exact-match commercial phrases from low-quality sources — can trigger algorithmic penalties, which is why link-building strategy favors diverse, editorial anchors. When a 301 redirect is in place, most link equity, including the anchor signal from those inbound links, passes through to the destination URL. For domain investors evaluating an aged name, auditing its anchor text distribution is a standard due-diligence step: a clean, topically coherent profile is a genuine SEO asset; a spammy one may carry hidden ranking risk. Source: Google Search Central — Crawlable Links.