3 Free tools to analyze anchor text

In past blog posts, we have already covered how Penguin’s update has affected link exchange networks. One of the most important things is to avoid the over-optimization of the anchor text of your inbound links. With its latest algorithm update, Google has been penalizing the use of too many links with the same or very few keyword variations in their anchor text. To prevent getting a penalty remember to:

• create several link variations on your campaigns – the more link credit you spend, the more variations you’ll want to make.
• make sure that 40% of your links are natural links like “click here” “http://yoursite.com” as it’s being recommended.

On the last bullet point, you will need to take into account other sources of backlinks. Three tools to achieve this are:

Google webmaster tools

This is big G’s very own free SEO tool. Though it’s not as comprehensive as other options it is a very reliable way of finding out your rankings and the most used keywords to link to your site.

Open Site Explorer (Recommended)

Open Site Explorer is SEOMoz Tool, well known in the community. You just need to register a free account to access it’s anchor text feature, accessible on a tab just after typing your site url and clicking on “Search”.

Majestic SEO

Their Site Explorer is very extensive, when entering an url in the “Explore” field you will get valuable info: anchor text of all your links, the number of links of each of them. The problem: It is limited to the 10 anchor texts most used to link to you.

Once you know how your content is being linked, you just need to do the maths. The result of dividing “Natural links” by “Keyword links” should be around 6.’6.