The anchor text, link label, or link text is the visible, clickable text in an HTML hyperlink. The term "anchor" was used in older versions of the HTML specification[1] for what is currently referred to as the "a element", or <a>.[2] The HTML specification does not have a specific term for anchor text, but refers to it as "text that the a element wraps around". In XML terms (since HTML is XML), the anchor text is the content of the element, provided that the content is text.[3]
Usually, web search engines analyze anchor text from hyperlinks on web pages. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive from search engines. Other services apply the basic principles of anchor text analysis as well. For instance, academic search engines may use citation context to classify academic articles,[4] and anchor text from documents linked in mind maps may be used too.[5]
- ^ "HTML 3.2 Reference Specification".
- ^ "HTML Standard".
- ^ "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition)".
- ^ Bader Aljaber; Nicola Stokes; James Bailey; Jian Pei (1 April 2010). "Document clustering of scientific texts using citation contexts". Information Retrieval. 13 (2). Springer: 101–131. doi:10.1007/s10791-009-9108-x. S2CID 18990883.
- ^ Beel, Joeran (1 October 2010). "Retrieving Data from Mind Maps to Enhance Search Applications". Bulletin of IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries. Archived from the original on 29 September 2011. Retrieved 5 May 2011.