Site Explorer
How to use the Anchors report
The Anchors report shows you all anchor texts of backlinks pointing to a target website, URL, or subsection.
![How to use SE Anchors-1](https://static.ahrefs.com/images/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs/v2-site-explorer/anchors-1.png)
Here are some actionable use cases for this report.
Check backlink profiles for over-optimized anchor texts
If you’re looking to acquire a new site, it’s worth checking the backlink profile for signs of over-optimization.
To do this, enter your website and add a Dofollow filter to find anchor texts of value-passing links.
![How to use SE Anchors-2](https://static.ahrefs.com/images/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs/v2-site-explorer/anchors-2.png)
Usually, sites with natural link profiles have a high percentage of branded anchors. If you see a high number of unnatural anchor texts, that might be a sign of over-optimization.
Monitor your website for SEO negative attacks
Enter your website and check for unnatural or irrelevant anchor texts. Even better, type in common negative SEO anchors, like “poker”.
![How to use SE Anchors-3](https://static.ahrefs.com/images/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs/v2-site-explorer/anchors-3.png)
It looks like we’re receiving a considerable amount of spammy backlinks with the anchor text “casinobonuspoker”. If this influx coincides with a significant organic traffic drop, we may want to manually disavow them.
![How to use SE Anchors-4](https://static.ahrefs.com/images/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs/v2-site-explorer/anchors-4.png)
Find out your competitor’s most linkable assets
Publish content people in your industry want to link to.
Analyze a competing page with lots of backlinks and see if you can find any patterns in their anchor text.
For example, if we analyze this article about a popular link building strategy, we can see plenty of links to target using the anchor "110%”.
![How to use SE Anchors-5](https://static.ahrefs.com/images/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs/v2-site-explorer/anchors-5.png)
To delve deeper, enter the pattern into the “Include” box. In this example, searching for “110%” shows us that people are linking because of a statistic in the post.
![How to use SE Anchors-6](https://static.ahrefs.com/images/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs/v2-site-explorer/anchors-6.png)
Keep learning
Check out our guide to anchor text on the Ahrefs blog: