Anchor Text Analyzer
Analyse link profiles, anchor text distribution and link attributes on any page.
Analyse a URL
Results
Enter a URL and every anchor on the page appears here: where each one points, what its rel says, and how the anchor text is distributed across the set.
How to use it
- Paste a URL and hit Analyse. The page is fetched server-side, so nothing is limited by what your browser is allowed to read cross-origin, and nav and footer links are counted alongside the body ones.
- Read the link profile tiles first, then the internal against external bar. Those two answer whether the page is feeding your own site or someone else's.
- Use the scope and destination filters in the left panel to narrow everything at once. Filtering to a path prefix recounts the distribution over just those links, which is how you check one section's linking in isolation.
- Check the distribution table for a single phrase carrying too much of the page, and the findings card for empty anchors, altless image links and nofollowed internal links.
- Switch to Paste HTML to check markup before it ships, or Bulk URLs to run up to 20 pages at once and export the summary.
Getting anchor text right
- Write anchor text that would still make sense read out on its own, with the surrounding sentence removed. That is roughly the context a search engine has when it weighs the link, and it is exactly the context a screen reader user has when they tab through a page's links.
- Internal anchor text is the one part of a link profile you fully control, which makes it the one most worth getting right. It is also the part most often left to a template that repeats the same phrase site-wide.
- Vary internal anchor text on purpose. Five different pages linking to your pricing page with five different phrasings looks like five editors making independent decisions, which is what it should look like.
- Do not nofollow your own internal links. Google stopped redistributing the equity a nofollow drops back in 2009, so the link no longer hands it to a sibling page, it simply loses it. Control crawling with robots.txt and indexing with noindex.
- An image link's alt attribute is its anchor text. A linked logo with no alt is a link carrying no signal at all, and on a site-wide header that is every page on the site.
- "Click here" and "read more" describe the click, not the destination. Every one of them is a relevance signal you had the chance to send and did not.
- Use rel=sponsored for paid placements and rel=ugc for anything a commenter wrote. Both do the same job nofollow used to, and both tell Google what kind of link it is rather than just that you would rather it were ignored.
Frequently asked questions
What is anchor text and why does it matter for SEO?
Anchor text is the clickable text inside a link. Search engines have used it since the earliest days of ranking as a description of the destination written by someone other than the destination's owner, which is what makes it valuable: a page can claim anything about itself, but a link is a third party vouching for what the page is about. That applies inside your own site too. Internal anchor text tells Google which of your pages is the one about a given topic, and it is the cheapest way to make that clear on a large site where every page looks structurally alike.
What is anchor text over-optimisation?
It is what happens when the same keyword-rich phrase points at the same page too many times, usually because someone decided that phrase was the target and applied it everywhere. Natural linking does not produce that pattern. Real editors writing real sentences produce a long tail of phrasings, brand mentions, bare URLs and the occasional "here". A profile where one exact phrase dominates is the signature of deliberate targeting, and Google's response since the first Penguin update in 2012 has been to discount those links rather than reward them. This tool flags any anchor text carrying more than 20% of a page's links, and any exact phrase pointing at one URL five or more times.
Should I use nofollow on external links?
Not by default. An editorial link to a good source is part of what makes a page useful, and the small amount of equity it passes is not worth engineering around. Reach for rel=sponsored when the link is paid or affiliate, rel=ugc when a commenter or forum user put it there, and rel=nofollow when you are citing something you do not want to endorse at all, such as a source you are criticising. Google has treated all three as hints rather than directives since 2020, so the value in them is mostly in describing the link honestly.
How many links should a page have?
There is no limit worth quoting. Google dropped its old "about 100 links" guidance years ago and can crawl pages with far more. The number that matters is how many links a reader can meaningfully choose between, and how much of the page's authority each one ends up carrying: 300 links means each one carries a three-hundredth of whatever the page has to pass on. If a page's links are mostly navigation repeated on every template, the handful of editorial links in the body are competing with all of them.
Why do some links show no anchor text?
Three causes, and this tool tells them apart. An anchor wrapping only an image has no text of its own, so the image's alt attribute serves in its place, and the row shows that alt or flags its absence. An anchor with a title attribute but no text shows the title, which browsers surface on hover but which carries far less weight than real text. And an anchor with genuinely nothing inside it, usually an icon rendered by CSS or a JavaScript-driven control, shows as empty. The last one is worth fixing with a visually hidden span, which gives both crawlers and screen readers something to work with.