Anchor text on a linking page is associated with the destination page by Google for retrieval and ranking.

Cited by documentation

Sources

• Link best practices for Google

  Google Search Central · primary source · retrieved 2026-08-20

  “Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages” — Page intro

  “for Google to understand what the page you're linking to is about” — Section: Write good anchor text

• The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

  Stanford University (Brin & Page, WWW7 1998) · primary source · retrieved 2026-08-20

  “we associate it with the page the link points to” — Section 2.2 Anchor Text

  “we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank” — Section 4.5.1 The Ranking System

• Information retrieval

  Google Research · primary source · retrieved 2026-08-20

  “best description of a page is often derived from the anchor text associated with the links to a page.” — lines 94-95

• Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of links

  Google Search Central · primary source · retrieved 2026-08-20

  “Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at.” — lines 966-968

• Introduction to Information Retrieval: The Web as a graph

  Cambridge University Press (Manning, Raghavan, Schütze) · retrieved 2026-08-20

  “The anchor text pointing to page B is a good description of page B” — Chapter 21, The Web as a graph

Related claims

• NARROWSThe anchor text of inbound links can be a major determinant of which query terms a page ranks for in Google.Under evaluation