Editing Anchor text (section)

{{Short description|Visible, clickable text in a hyperlink}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=January 2024}}
[[File:Anchor text.png|thumb|The phrase "academic search engines" is the anchor text in the [[hyperlink]] that the cursor is pointing to.]]

The '''anchor text''', '''link label''', or '''link text''' is the visible, clickable text in an [[HTML]] [[hyperlink]]. The term "anchor" was used in older versions of the HTML specification<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|url=https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/#anchor|title = HTML 3.2 Reference Specification}}</ref> for what is currently referred to as the "[[Anchor element|a element]]", or {{tag|a|o}}.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/textlevel-semantics.html#the-a-element|title = HTML Standard}}</ref> The HTML specification does not have a specific term for anchor text, but refers to it as "text that the a element wraps around". In [[XML]] terms (since HTML is XML), the anchor text is the content of the element, provided that the content is text.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#dt-content|title = Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition)}}</ref>

Usually, web search engines analyze anchor text from hyperlinks on web pages. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the [[ranking (information retrieval)|ranking]] that the page will receive from search engines. Other services apply the basic principles of anchor text analysis as well. For instance, [[List of academic databases and search engines|academic search engines]] may use [[citation]] context to classify [[Academic publishing|academic articles]],<ref>{{cite journal|author1=Bader Aljaber |author2=Nicola Stokes |author3=James Bailey |author4=Jian Pei |title=Document clustering of scientific texts using citation contexts |journal=Information Retrieval |volume=13 |issue=2 |pages=101–131 |date=1 April 2010|publisher=Springer|doi=10.1007/s10791-009-9108-x |s2cid=18990883 }}</ref> and anchor text from documents linked in [[mind maps]] may be used too.<ref>{{cite web |last=Beel |first=Joeran |date=1 October 2010 |title=Retrieving Data from Mind Maps to Enhance Search Applications |url=http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/current/Beel/beel.html |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110929023425/http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/current/Beel/beel.html |archive-date=29 September 2011 |accessdate=5 May 2011 |publisher=Bulletin of IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries}}</ref>