Skip to Main Content

Using and Linking to Outside Resources: Hyperlinking and Anchor Text

This guide is intended to help blog writers and other web content creators use government resources better to avoid dead links and incorporate the highest quality information from sources in governments and major international organizations.

Linking Guide

Hyperlink Best Practices 

  • Link to authoritative sources for the reference you seek 
  • Follow conventions specific to particular subjects 
    • For journal article, choose the DOI 
    • For blogs, choose a permanent URL 
  • Avoid overly long links  
  • When linking to bio pages, consider the LinkedIn profile over the corporate bio page because the corporate page will go away if they leave the organization 
  • Avoid links that are likely to go dead
    • Dead links are a chronic issue for websites and you cannot fully avoid them, and some sources routinely archive or remove content, so look for more stable links or sources
    • US government sites will commonly archive pages when a presidential administration changes
      • There is no way around this but the URL structure will remain mostly intact allowing for easy changes to bring up the content
      • This is more that case with content related to policy makers or legislation, a lot of content is intended to be stable
    • For information on legislation or testimony in hearings, choose archival links 
      • The archival source will vary by country 
      • For the US, the Library of Congress maintains the archives and is preferable to links to committee pages because those are subject to removal every two years 
    • For UN international recognition days, it can be rather tricky
      • The hosting agency will frequently remove content for anything but the current year
      • Some alternatives to find stable content to link to:
        • If your organization is writing content specific to a one year, you might find a better link pointing to a blog about that year rather than a UN site, for example this blog post discusses World Food Day 2017 but the UN content is gone
        • You can find a listing of all international recognition days at https://www.un.org/en/observances/list-days-weeks and the pages listed are general pages for the recognition day and will be current and stable, but not archival
  • Don’t link directly to PDFs 

Anchor Text Best Practices 

The anchor text, or the text that is hyperlinked on a page, is often overlooked, but search engines actually read it and surrounding text to make sense of the content on a site. The founders of Google have incorporated the practice from the very beginning, writing about it while still at Stanford. Page and Brin made the point that the anchor text was more relevant at describing the purpose of a link than the page on which it was listed, and Google likely now uses natural language processing to examine anchor text and surround words and context. 

The best practice for anchor text follows the logic for SEO over all in that web masters should build the best content possible and make it as easily understood by the users. Avoid gaming the search engine by stuffing keywords into the anchor text, just like you should avoid keyword stuffing on web pages. Mix up the types of anchor text used, and describe the linked resource in the surround text to make it clear to both human and machine users what they are linking to.

Types of anchor text 

  • Exact match: the text matches the keywords you are using exactly 
  • Partial match: the text includes other words in addition to the keywords  
  • Branded: brand names as anchor text 
  • Generic: text not specific to your page, “download” or “here” 
  • Naked link: the entire hyperlink string used as a link 
  • Image: using an image as a link, in this case alt text is very important for SEO 

Best Practice for Anchor Text 

  • Avoid too many keywords in anchor text
  • Use different types on a page, refraining from overreliance on one type
  • Avoid random text as that can look like a click bait technique and algorithms would penalize that
  • Through improved natural language processing, Google does incorporate surrounding text into algorithms and does not rely solely on anchor text, but
  • Google algorithms change without warning and are never explained, so site managers should monitor the webmaster guidelines for any changes.

Further Reading on Anchor Text 

McCoy, Julia What Is Anchor Text? Everything You Need to Know for SEO. Semrush Blog. May 25, 2021 

Moz Blog. Anchor Text.  

What to do for long links

If you think a URL is too long, take a look and see if there is extra stuff at the end or if it is just a long string of words used for the URL. Some URLs are based on a blog post title and are just a long string of words and that is not really a problem. For stability, you want the simplest link that resolves to the target page, and may URLs have extra stuff at the end, so try removing it in chunks to see if you still get to the page you want. 

Here are examples of long links along with some reasons they went bad. 

What to do for archived sites

Many US Executive branch websites will archive everything from past presidential administrations.

US Congressional sites are also archived routinely for past congressional sessions

Librarian

IFPRI is a CGIAR Research Center