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How to use the Anchors report

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

How to use SE Anchors-1

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.

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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”.

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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.

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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%”.

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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.

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Internal backlinks