You know that many uses of anchor text on links around the web do not say much about where it is linking to. There are tons of "click here" links or other links that are not descriptive. Mihai Aperghis asked John Mueller of Google about the context around a link and how Google treats that.
In short, John said the context and content around the link is secondary. He said "that really strong piece of context from that anchor text that is missing in that case and then small things around the side, that does help us a little bit."
Mihai asked "Can Google get context for what is around that link?"
John Mueller said: "Sure. But that is more kind of secondary. Like that really strong piece of context from that anchor text that is missing in that case. And then small things around the side, that does help us a little bit. But really the kind of primary aspect of that link is kind of gone. And usually that doesn’t matter. It is not that it counts against your web site in anyway, it is just for this particular link, we don’t really know what the context is."
He goes on a bit more and you can watch the whole thing, it all starts at about 16:35 mark into this mornings hangout. Here is the embed so you can click and play it at that start time, it isn't too long:
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
