Anchor and Anchor List: What Are They
Anchor — the visible text of a link. For the search engine, it is a short description of the target page from a third-party perspective, so the anchor influences both the understanding of the topic and the risks.
Types of Anchors
| Type | Example | Role in Profile |
|---|---|---|
| Branded | Company name or domain | Foundation of a natural profile |
| Non-anchor | “here”, “more details”, the address itself | Dilution |
| General thematic | “link promotion service” | Thematic signal without over-spamming |
| Exact commercial | “buy cascading links cheaply” | Direct influence and main source of risk |
| Image | Text in the alt attribute | Works as an anchor of a regular link |
Anchor List
Anchor list — a set of options that alternate between placements. It solves two tasks: it prevents the profile from becoming uniform and distributes weight across different formulations of the query. In the platform, the anchor list is set in the link settings, and the choice of option for each publication is made by rotation.
Internal Anchors
The same rule applies within the site: the link “read more” tells the search nothing, while a link with the topic name does. Moreover, internal anchors are safer than external ones: over-spamming in menus and interlinking is rare, and there is much benefit from meaningful formulations.
What a Natural Set Looks Like
A site that has not been specifically promoted has anchors that look random: company name, bare address, “here”, a fragment of an article title, sometimes a word completely unrelated to the topic. This randomness is the norm. Therefore, a perfectly calibrated list of ten commercial formulations looks more suspicious than a set with “garbage” — this is what should be imitated.
What to Check
The distribution of anchors on the page can be shown by the link analyzer, and how this is arranged in the platform interface is detailed in the article “Anchors and Wishes”.