More insight into anchor text

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Last month, we replaced the individual anchor text words that we showed for your site in Webmaster Tools with a list of full anchor phrases. This report shows you the top phrases that other sites use to link to the pages of your site. Now, we've enhanced the information we show you in the following ways:

  • We've expanded the number of phrases we show to 200.
  • You can now see the variations of each phrase (for instance, with different capitalization and punctuation).
  • More sites now have access to the anchor phrase report. So, if you didn't have this report before, you may have it now.
  • We've brought back the report showing the most common individual words in anchor text (you asked; we delivered!).
  • We've expanded the number of common words in anchor text and common words in your site that we show to 100 each.

To view this information, click the Page analysis link from the Statistics tab.

anchor text report within the links report in webmaster tools

In addition, we've updated our robots.txt analysis tool to correctly interpret the new Sitemap instruction that we announced support for last week.

We hope this additional insight is helpful in learning how others view your site and keep your suggestions coming! We're listening.