How to use the anchor text extractor
- Copy the HTML of any page — right-click a page and choose View Page Source, or paste a snippet you already have.
- Paste it into the box and click Extract anchors.
- Review the list: each row shows the anchor text on the left and its href on the right.
- Watch the warnings at the bottom for links with empty anchor text or missing href attributes.
Why anchor text matters for SEO
Anchor text — the visible, clickable words in a link — is one of the strongest signals search engines use to understand what the target page is about. A link labeled "best running shoes" tells Google the destination is relevant to running shoes. A generic label like "click here" passes far less meaning. Auditing the anchor text across your site and your backlinks reveals whether your link profile looks natural and descriptive.
Reading the results
Each result row pairs the anchor text with its target URL so you can scan the relationship at a glance. The total link count tells you how many anchors the page contains, which is useful when auditing navigation, footers and content links. The warnings flag two common problems: links with no visible text, which are invisible to users and hard for crawlers to interpret, and links missing an href entirely, which are often broken by a template error.
Common anchor text problems to fix
Image links that lack alt text appear as empty anchors, and JavaScript-only links may have no href at all. Over-optimized pages often reuse the exact same commercial keyword in every link, which can look unnatural. Reviewing your extracted list helps you add descriptive text to image links, replace vague labels like "here", and vary keyword-heavy anchors so your profile stays healthy.
How to audit a backlink profile
When you extract anchors from a page that links to your site, you are looking at how others describe you. A natural profile mixes branded anchors, bare URLs and a small share of keyword-rich anchors. If every link uses the same exact-match keyword, it can read as manufactured rather than earned. Use the extractor to pull the full list, group the anchors by text, and compare the distribution before you decide which links to disavow or clean up.