Anchor Text

Synonyms

Anchor; Anchor text surrogate

Definition

Anchor text is the text associated with a hyperlink pointing from one Web document to another. Anchor text provides a concise description of a document, not necessarily written by the author of the document. It is very effective in Web search retrieval tasks, and in particular, in tasks where the aim is to find the home page of a given website.

Key Points

Hyperlink analysis algorithms explicitly employ the hyperlinks between Web documents to find high quality or authoritative Web documents. A form of implicit use of the hyperlinks in combination with content analysis is the use anchor text associated with the incoming hyperlinks of documents. Web documents can be represented by an anchor text surrogate, which is formed by collecting the anchor text associated with the hyperlinks pointing to the document.

The anchor text of the incoming hyperlinks provides a concise description for a Web document. The used terms in the anchor text may be...