Google Expands Anchors

Webmasters should be pleased with the latest news from Google’s Vanessa Fox. The product manager for Google’s Webmaster Central announced some changes to the anchor phrase function of that toolkit.

Vanessa described the changes to the anchor phrase information on the product’s blog. She listed five enhancements now available in the Page Analysis link under Webmaster Tools’ Statistics tab:

• We’ve expanded the number of phrases we show to 200.

• You can now see the variations of each phrase (for instance, with different capitalization and punctuation).
• More sites now have access to the anchor phrase report. So, if you didn’t have this report before, you may have it now.
• We’ve brought back the report showing the most common individual words in anchor text (you asked; we delivered!).
• We’ve expanded the number of common words in anchor text and common words in your site that we show to 100 each.

Knowing how people find one’s website can help search optimization and marketing efforts greatly. Webmasters who aren’t spending some time with Google’s product may want to consider it now.