A few weeks ago, Marcus at SeoFM reported of a blogposting in which the author assumed that Google will only read out a maximum of 55 characters per link. I thought this to be quite interesting, seeing that – even though the assumption about Google not using overly long link texts seems to be obvious – there are not many informations on this subject which are, at least, partially verified. Sadly, Shaun did not mention the source of this consideration, so I had to make up a test myself.

To test for the maximum length of the anchor-text, I created 54 pages where each one receives one link with the linktext-length between 10 and 64 characters. You can take an online look at it here. Seeing that the linktext does not occur on the on the linked-to pages themselves, the deliberation here was that Google will only be able to find the linked page through the linktext if the complete linktext was evaluated. For the 10-character-link it looks like this:


Besides the summary page, which was used to link the pages, the linked-to page was also found. When you click on cache, you get the anticipated info that “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: sis8f14e45”. I thought that I would just go through the links one by one and, for a certain number, I would notice that Google would not be using the (complete) linktext anymore. Sadly this did not work out at all, even if a link has 64 characters, Google will use the complete linktext:


Because the longest German word (“Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz“, at least that is what know-it-all-pedia says) has only 63 characters, a limit that is above these 64 characters should be irrelevant in practice. The next consideration was that link texts are often composed of not only one word and that Google might cut something off for compound link texts. To keep it short, this does not seem to be the case either. The linktext which was composed of two words with 64 characters as well as a space in-between (a grand total of 129 characters) is evaluated without a problem and the cache also holds no surprises.


Now, another consideration is if Google will limit the linktext if there are a certain number of words in it. Sadly I did not think of this when I created the first two tests, but I just now made up for it. Once the results are in, there will certainly be a follow up to this article.


How long may a linktext be? (part I)
How long may a linktext be? (part II)
How long may a linktext be? (part III)