Anchor Text Generator
Link Code That Reads Well

What Anchor Text Has To Do

Link text does three jobs at once. It tells a reader where the link goes, it tells a screen reader user the same thing out of context, and it tells a search engine what the target page is about.

One phrase has to serve all three. "Click here" serves none of them, because it describes the action rather than the destination.

People using screen readers can pull up all links on a page and jump between them. In such a list, a dozen "read more" links look like a dozen copies of one row.

So write the destination. The anchor element reference says the same thing, and it has said it for years.

The Three Rel Values

nofollow says this link is not an endorsement. sponsored says it was paid for, in money or in goods. ugc says somebody else wrote it, in a comment or a forum post.

Google treats all three as hints now rather than orders, and its guidance on qualifying outbound links explains which to use where.

The one that matters commercially is sponsored. Leaving it off a paid link is the thing that earns a manual action, and nobody notices until it does.

New Tabs And The Word noopener

A link with target="_blank" hands the opened page a reference back to yours. That page can then navigate your tab somewhere else.

rel="noopener noreferrer" closes it. Modern browsers add the protection themselves for target="_blank", and older ones do not, so the attribute stays worth writing.

This tool adds both words for you whenever the new tab switch is on, because remembering it every time is exactly the sort of thing nobody does.

Writing Anchor Text People Can Use

Say where the link goes, in the words the reader would use. Somewhere around four or five words tends to be plenty.

Skip vague anchors such as click here or read more. Out of context they say nothing, and a screen reader user often hears links as a list.

Keep the exact-match phrase rare. A page linked forty times with the same commercial phrase looks bought, because usually it was.

Vary it instead. Real citations use your brand, your page title, the bare address and the odd descriptive phrase, in roughly that order.

When A New Tab Is Wrong

A forced new tab overrides the reader and leaves the back button useless. Keep it for a form somebody is halfway through, and skip it everywhere else.

Internal Links Are Where Anchor Text Pays

Nobody controls the words other sites use to link to them. Your own site is the opposite: every internal link is a sentence you wrote.

So describe the target page the way a reader would ask for it. A link saying "our pricing" is worth more than one saying "here".

Vary the phrasing rather than repeating one exact string forty times. Varied wording reads more naturally and looks less like a ranking trick.

Where Link Text Gets Read Out Of Context

Screen readers can pull up a list of all links on a page, with none of the surrounding text. Twelve links reading "read more" become twelve identical rows.

Search engines read anchor text as a description of the target page, which is why a whole site of "click here" links describes nothing.

People scanning a page do the same thing with their eyes. They jump between the blue words, reading only those.

All three audiences want the same fix. Name the destination in the link text, and the sentence around it still reads normally.

Relative Paths Versus Full URLs in Your Links

Inside your own site, a relative link is shorter and survives a move between staging and production.

Everywhere else it fails. An email, a feed, a PDF and a forum post have no page to resolve it against.

So the checks panel says when a relative address looks wrong for what you are building. The rule is simple: leaving your site means using the full address.

The Title Attribute Does Very Little

It shows a tooltip on hover, which touch devices have no equivalent of, and most screen readers ignore it. If the information matters, put it in the link text.