SEO – Anchor Text Link Length?
Republished from Oct 20, 2008 – As this post is getting talked about in forums at the moment I thought I’d bring to the front of the blog so comments can be added if you wish 
Anchor Text Optimisation
As a seo I wanted to know – how many words or characters does Google count in a link? What’s best practice when creating links – internal, or external? What is the optimal length of a HTML link?
It appears the answer to the question ‘how many words in a text link” is 55 characters, about 8-10 words.
Why is this important to know?
- You get to understand how many words Google will count as part of a link
- You can see why you should keep titles to a maximum amount of characters
- You can see why your domain name should be short and why urls should be snappy
- You can see why you should rewrite your urls (SEF)
- It’s especially useful especially when thinking about linking internally, via body text on a page.
Richard, who runs an outdoor clothing website, wanted to see how many words Google will count in one ‘link’ to pass on anchor text power to a another page so I did a test a bit like this one below;
- pointed some nonsense words in one massive link, 50 words long, at the home page of a ‘trusted’ site
- each of the nonsense words were 6 characters long
- Then I did a search for something generic that the site would rank no1 for, and added the nonsense words to the search, so that the famous “This word only appear in links to the site” (paraphrase) kicked in
- This I surmised would let me see how many of the nonsense words Google would attribute to the target page from the massive 50 word link I tried to get it to swallow.
Using a character calculator tool the answer was…..
- Google counted 8 words in the anchor text link out of a possible 50.
- It seemed to ignore everything else after the 8th word
- 8 words x 6 characters = 48 characters + 7 spaces = a nice round and easy to remember number – 55 Characters.
So, a possible best practice in number of words in an anchor text might be to keep a link under 8 words but importantly under 55 characters because everything after it is ignored (in the link)?
Linkbuilding
This of course has an impact in writing your titles for pieces you want linked to – especially for those with a habit of taking the article title and linking it to the page. Most are aware a title should be under 70 characters to have maximum impact in Google. From a test I did, Google ignored words in a title after 70+ characters. But if Google only attributes the first 55 characters in a link, does this mean there’s at least a 10-20 character no-man’s land to consider when creating links & headlines?
All the more reason to have important keywords at the beginning of your page title, and your brand name at the very end?
If you like this test, you might like;
- Will Google Rank Pages Better With Valid Code?
- How Many Words Will Google Count In The Title Tag?
- A Google Friendly Website Navigation System
- Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimisation
What do you think about this anchor text optimisation observation?
Written by Shaun Anderson
Killer, Shaun. Thanks for the test and the results!
Brian
Thanks Brian. Thought it might be useful to share and get some feedback
Sounds like a bug
Thanks for publishing the test results!
I always like to front load my titles with the keywords and this just justifies it a little more. Thanks for the info.
Thanks Ann
Other people may have different thoughts and findings – hope they share 
@Brent thanks for the comment. I like to keep it natural as possible, but by keeping keywords within the first 55 characters, it may be you are ensuring anchor text power in a link
Keep anchor text links under 55 characters
You’ve performed an interesting test, but it appears you still have more questions.
That’s usually the case with research. Every answer brings more questions while moving you closer to truth.
Research is important. And Internet marketers who do the most research seem to be the most successful.
Warmly,
Linda P. Morton
That’s part of the fun being a seo – it’s all experimentation
Great test, but I don’t think this to be true, personally – although I am always interested in the tests of others and appreciate your thoughts on this topic!
First, Google reports link text in GWT that is much longer than 55 characters. Also, I have seen that if the keywords are contained somewhere in your page, they will show more than 55 characters of text in the ‘cached’ version that you are referring to.
They may truncate the text for ‘links pointing at this page’, but I doubt that this means they ‘ignore’ the other characters.
Good comment Mark. It’s always worth remembering nobody knows what Google is doing. Kinds of reminds me of the age-old meta description arguments about what Google reads and what it counts when ranking sites
I wanted to see if I could test something it in the wild – these are simply the results I got from that individual test.
Its always worth remembering there is probably a cut off point for what Google counts as a link – why not 55 characters?
Might be an anti-spam measure, too.
Agreed, I guess the only way to tell is to keep on testing
Cheers
You are right. The most important keywords need to be at the beginning of the link. I typically will have about five words in the anchor text of which four are important.
However in the future Google may expand from 55 chars to 100; so long links are not a bad idea, just make sure to have the most important keys at the front.
Great test Shaun, that’s what I love about Hobo – your not afraid to test and share.
Thanks Paul. In cases like this I think this sort of test can help anyone, and hurt no-one, so I blab about it.
Another great article, 5 star, that’s what internet is for – the sharing of information
Hello Shaun,
This is great to have an idea of what I need to do. I just wish I had know this a long time ago.
I am usually a fanatic about keeping things short but, now I have a number to keep in mind (give or take a few).
Thank you again!
Thanks for the comment Sheryl
I’ve heard some goody things about this blog. Remember to balance the pics with the text tho. cheers!
「Googleã¯ã€ã‚¢ãƒ³ã‚«ãƒ¼ãƒ†ã‚ストã®ä½•æ–‡å—ç›®ã¾ã§ã‚’ã€ãã—ã¦ä½•ç•ªç›®ã¾ã§ã®å˜èªžã‚’カウントã™ã‚‹ã®ã‹ã€ã€
Hoboブãƒã‚°ã®Shaunæ°ãŒã€å®Ÿé¨“を通ã—ã¦èª¿æŸ»ã—ã¾ã—ãŸã€‚
Keyword stuffing in anchor text is another point that can often get overlooked by web designers or search marketers. Search engines are smart enough to pick up repetions in anchor text as much as in standard on page text. Often while we are careful to ensure there is no keyword stuffing in main body text and that the content flows as regular language; you will be surprised to see how many times the keywords are repeated within the anchor text. Whilst it is perfectly OK and an effective SEO technique to use most desired keywords within the anchor and title for links and images; it is improtant to ensure slight variations as opposed to simply repeating the exact phrases.
It is an important point you make to place the more important key phrases/terms earlier in the link, however to place an actual number on what Google cuts at is unrealistic from this test.
A dozen (200+ possibly) other variables may effect this, some possibilities I can think of on the spur of the moment are page length, word relevance (random character strings are not going to seem very relevant), main-text length, link length of all links on page, link length of all links to the target page, etc.
Thanks for the test-results
This is a nice article! Again, didn’t even think of this as something to erm, think about.
This is something I have never even considered. Food for thought
Awesome test!
Would have taken me forever if ever to come to the conclusion to do the test like that =p
Good Work and thanks for sharing =)
@Chris McGiffen – probably why you (and others) should test it too
Great article. Thanks for sharing.
Nice test, I was recently thinking about writing an automated unit test suite in Django to run a whole bunch of tests against Google ranking and indexing patterns.
Great post. Keep up the good work hobo-web
Too Cool buddy great work
Shaun, if it’s true then do you think Google shall also limit the indexed title of the pages to 55 characters. My research on this showed me my blog has blog post titles more than 55 characters clearly indexed. This is certainly an interesting research at your end, and would like to discuss more on this.
Thanks for the great SEO tip on anchor links. 8-10 words at max, I will remember.
woow this very-very nice tips to get ranking on SERP.
thank’s for this tips shaun
interesting test but after 56 comments about 55 words in anchor link, there is no one can demonstrate the truth of this statement.
so, how can we trust on it?
Chris – Test it yourself :p
[...] ON EDIT: Here is Shaun’s article: SEO – Limit Anchor Text Links To 55 Characters In Length? [...]
Nice test, missed this the first time around.
@Shaun: Thanks for bringing this up again, you tested the LONG lengh of title earlier and each search engine dealt with it differently. Did you try finding out the behavior for other search engines.
Will start keeping this limit in mind while writing titles
Cool test!
It is nice to finally see some one test this. I have always been a big fan of short anchor text links, 2 – 4 words max. I was never sure how far Google would read. I wonder if they rate the 8 words equally. I bet they don’t.
Thanks for the heads up. I have been running my blog for around 6 months now and am looking to get more inbound links like everyone else.
It is interesting to know that they only count the first 8 words in the anchor text link. Something to bear in mind for the future.
This is one of the reasons why I am so glad I started my own blog. You are always learning new things which is why it remains so interesting.
Thanks for the post.
[...] post made my eyes pop out: Google favors anchor text links of 55 characters or less for link building. We have noticed that from our own linkbuilding efforts that shorter [...]