The probability that a link will be clicked

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Google's original document referred to link anchor text by stating that "link text is treated specially by the search engine" and that "anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of pages than the pages themselves ."

In the early days of Google, anchor text had a key influence on a page's ranking.

If you want to rank for the term "red shoes", the more links you have that use that term as anchor text, the higher you could rank.

Backlink building became a race between SEOs to see who could get as many exact match anchor text links as possible from high PageRank pages. And it worked (for a while). But it was a manipulation of Google's webmaster guidelines and was specifically considered a link scheme .

Back in 2021, overuse of anchor text manipulation results in toxic links and potentially a manual penalty or algorithmic adjustment.


The likelihood that a link will be clicked is a key influence on PageRank and is referenced in Google's patent .

The original PageRank algorithm assigned equal weight to the links on a page. Considering the 2004 Reasonable Surfer patent indicates that not all links are equally likely to be clicked, giving different weight to different links depending on their click potential makes sense.

An example of links that are less likely to be clicked include "terms of service" links and banner ads, but could also include links in a footer or similar location.

Internal links
Internal linking is a powerful SEO tactic and there is a good reason for that.