Your Anchor Text Distribution Tells Google a Story
If 40% of the links pointing to your page use the exact phrase “best running shoes,” Google gets suspicious. Natural link profiles don’t look like that. Real people link with brand names, URLs, “click here,” random phrases, and only occasionally with the exact keyword. When the pattern looks manufactured, you’ve got a problem.
Paste HTML content into this tool and it extracts every link, classifies each anchor text (branded, generic, exact-match, or other), and shows the percentage breakdown. You’ll also see dofollow vs. nofollow counts and a frequency table of every unique anchor phrase. Export the whole thing as CSV for your audit spreadsheet.
What a Healthy Profile Looks Like
Roughly 40-50% branded anchors (your company name, site name, variations). 15-25% generic (“click here,” “read more,” “this article”). 5-10% exact-match (your target keyword phrase). The rest as partial matches, naked URLs, and miscellaneous text.
If your exact-match percentage creeps above 20%, that’s a red flag. Google’s Penguin update specifically targets manipulative anchor text patterns, and even in the post-Penguin era, unnatural distributions can suppress your rankings.
Real Audit Scenarios
Paste a blog post’s HTML and discover that 60% of your links say “click here.” That’s not a penalty risk, but it’s a massive missed opportunity, those links could be using descriptive, keyword-relevant text that helps both users and search engines understand what they’re clicking through to.
Or paste the HTML from a page you suspect was hit by a penalty. If the anchor text distribution is heavily skewed toward exact-match phrases, you’ve found a likely cause.
Content editors use this before publishing to catch generic anchors they can improve. SEO consultants export the CSV data for client audit reports. Internal linking audits reveal whether your site’s own cross-links use varied, descriptive anchor text or fall into lazy “read more” patterns.
Pair this with the Keyword Density analyzer to check for over-optimization in both your content and your link text simultaneously.
Dofollow vs. Nofollow
Dofollow links (the default) pass link equity to the target page. Nofollow links (rel="nofollow") tell search engines not to count them for ranking. Knowing the ratio helps you understand how much link value a page is actually distributing vs. keeping.
Your HTML stays in your browser. Nothing gets sent to a server.