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Backlinks → Anchor Text shows the distribution of anchor text across your backlink profile — the words other people use when linking to you.

The table

25 rows per page, with a Filter anchors… box. The overview shows the same data as a Top Anchor Texts donut limited to the top 10; this page is the full list.

What to look for

Anchor text is a relevance signal, so its distribution says something about how search engines read your site — and about how natural your link profile looks. A healthy profile is mostly branded and unremarkable. Your company name, your domain, and phrases like “here”, “this article”, or the page title. Naturally-earned links are boring, because people link by naming you or by pointing at something. Exact-match commercial anchors should be a small minority. If your target keyword is your most common anchor by a distance, that’s the classic signature of bought or manipulated links, and it’s a pattern search engines look for. Empty or missing anchors usually mean image links. They pass authority but carry no textual signal. Anchors you don’t recognize — unrelated terms, other languages, spam phrases — are worth tracing back through the backlink list to see which sites are generating them.

Rough proportions

There’s no official ratio, but as a sanity check, a profile that grew naturally tends to look something like: If yours is inverted — exact-match dominant, branded rare — that’s the finding, whether or not you built the links deliberately.

Filtering

Filter to check a specific concern:
  • Your brand name, to see how much of the profile is branded
  • A target keyword, to check for over-optimization on it
  • A competitor’s name, to find comparison content linking to you

States