How to use the Anchors report

The Anchors report shows you all anchor texts of backlinks pointing to a target website, URL, or subsection.

Here are some actionable use cases for this report.

Check backlink profiles for over-optimized anchor texts

If you’re looking to acquire a new site, it’s worth checking the backlink profile for signs of over-optimization.

To do this, enter your website and add a Dofollow filter to find anchor texts of value-passing links.

Usually, sites with natural link profiles have a high percentage of branded anchors. If you see a high number of unnatural anchor texts, that might be a sign of over-optimization.

Monitor your website for SEO negative attacks

Enter your website and check for unnatural or irrelevant anchor texts. Even better, type in common negative SEO anchors, like “poker”.

It looks like we’re receiving a considerable amount of spammy backlinks with the anchor text “casinobonuspoker”. If this influx coincides with a significant organic traffic drop, we may want to manually disavow them.

Find out your competitor’s most linkable assets

Publish content people in your industry want to link to.

Analyze a competing page with lots of backlinks and see if you can find any patterns in their anchor text.

For example, if we analyze this article about a popular link building strategy, we can see plenty of links to target using the anchor "110%”.

To delve deeper, enter the pattern into the “Include” box. In this example, searching for “110%” shows us that people are linking because of a statistic in the post.

Keep learning

Check out our guide to anchor text on the Ahrefs blog:

• Anchor Text: A Data‐Driven Guide (384,614 Web Pages Studied)
• How to Do a Basic Backlink Audit (in Under 30 Minutes)