Search Engine Watch is reporting that Google has updated capabilities in its Webmaster Tools to show full phrases being used in anchor text, instead of just keywords within the anchor text of links to a site.
The benefit of this feature is that you can see what anchor text is being used to link to your site, which in turn provides some insight into what people think of your site, and why they are linking to it. The anchor text also affects Google's ranking algorithm as a key IBL (Inbound Linking) factor.
The report is available to verified webmasters who have logged into Google's Webmaster Tools, under the "Statistics" tab, in the "Page Analysis" section. The list of top 100 anchor text phrases can be viewed as a table or downloaded as a csv file.
The official post from Google's Vanessa Fox can be found here.Labels: anchor text, google webmaster tools, vanessa fox |
It's about time they've done that. I'm sure many webmasters are glad to at least turn off one of their scraper scripts