Anchor text for your homepage and money pages

For your homepage, roughly 30 to 50 percent of inbound anchor text should be branded (your name, your URL), with exact-match commercial phrases held under 5 percent. For money pages you can be more descriptive but should still keep any single exact-match phrase below about 10 percent of that page's external links. Internal links are the exception: there you control the anchors and can be keyword-rich safely.

That one paragraph covers most of the decisions you will make. The rest of this guide is the reasoning behind it: the exact distributions to aim for, why the homepage and a deep money page need different treatment, and the patterns that actually cause trouble. The mistakes that show up most often are not subtle. They are people pointing the same money keyword at their homepage forty times because it felt like the most powerful page on the site. It is the fastest way to look unnatural.

Why the homepage is a special case

Your homepage is the page people cite when they reference your company, not a specific service. When a journalist, a forum user, or a partner links to you, they almost always use your brand name, your bare URL, or something generic like this tool or their site. That is the natural behavior Google's link-quality systems learned from. A homepage whose backlink profile is dominated by branded and URL anchors looks exactly like a real, known brand. A homepage where 40 percent of anchors are best running shoes online looks like someone who bought links.

This is why branded anchors are not a compromise you make to stay safe. They are the correct signal. SEO agencies that publish anchor guidance agree that branded anchors should be the largest single bucket, even if their numbers differ: theStacc recommends 30 to 50 percent branded, 15 to 25 percent partial match, 10 to 20 percent generic, 5 to 15 percent naked URL and only 1 to 5 percent exact match (theStacc, 2026), while Lucid Media puts branded at 40 to 60 percent and exact match at 5 to 10 percent (Lucid Media, 2026). These are practitioner rules of thumb, not figures from Google. For the homepage specifically, push toward the top of the branded range.

The distribution to aim for

Here is a split to use as a starting point. Treat it as a center of gravity, not a quota. The right numbers come from the SERP you are competing in (covered below), but these ranges keep a homepage profile looking like a brand rather than a campaign.

Notice exact match is the smallest bucket and the only one with a hard ceiling. That is deliberate. The branded, URL, and generic buckets are forgiving; you can over-index on any of them without harm. Exact match is the only category where more is worse. Ahrefs' large-scale study of 384,614 pages across nearly 20,000 keywords found only a very weak correlation between the share of exact-match anchors and rankings, which tells you the upside is small and the downside (a manipulation footprint) is the real story (Ahrefs).

Money pages are different, but not a free-for-all

A money page (a service page, a product page, a category page) does target a specific commercial query, so it is reasonable for its inbound anchors to be more descriptive than your homepage's. The difference between branded and exact-match strategy per page type is worth understanding deeply, and our deep dive on branded vs exact-match anchors walks through it page by page. The short version: you can lean into partial-match and topical anchors on a money page, but you still respect a ceiling on any single exact phrase.

Why a ceiling per phrase rather than per page? Because the footprint that gets pages penalized is repetition of the same exact string. Semrush's anchor text guide warns that many links to the same page with the exact same anchor can look like an attempt to manipulate rankings, and names money and compound anchors as the ones most likely to be deemed suspicious (Semrush, 2024); FatJoe's rule of thumb is to keep keyword-rich anchors under 10 percent of the links to a page (FatJoe). So on a money page targeting commercial roof repair denver, do not let that exact phrase exceed about one link in ten. Use variations: roof repair in Denver, commercial roofing services, their Denver roofing team.

The full set of target percentages, including how to adjust them by niche aggressiveness, lives in our anchor text ratios guide. If you want concrete wording to copy for each bucket, the anchor text examples library gives you ready phrasings for branded, partial, generic, and exact-match links.

Internal links: the place you can relax

Here is the part people get backwards. They are terrified of keyword anchors externally, then they timidly link click here from their own pages to their money pages. That is the exact opposite of optimal. Internal links carry no algorithmic anchor-text risk because Google understands you control them and expects them to describe your own site structure.

Google's John Mueller has been explicit that internal anchor text gives Google context about the destination page, and that there is no penalty mechanism for descriptive internal anchors; the practical caveat he adds is that the effect on rankings is modest, so use anchors that genuinely help users navigate (Search Engine Journal). Translation: from a high-authority blog post, link to your money page with commercial roof repair in Denver rather than learn more. You get to use the exact-match anchor you would never risk externally, with zero downside. Our guide to internal anchor text covers how to route that authority deliberately.

Benchmark the SERP before you build

The single most useful habit is to stop guessing at percentages and look at what is already winning. Before you place a single external link, pull the backlink profiles of the top five to ten ranking pages for your target query and read their anchor distribution. If the page ranking first for your money keyword has 60 percent branded anchors and 4 percent exact match, your generic 1-to-5-percent template is irrelevant; you copy their reality.

This matters because anchor norms vary wildly by niche. Aggressive affiliate and gambling verticals run hotter exact-match profiles than, say, B2B SaaS, where almost everything is branded. The safe distribution is whatever makes you blend into your own SERP, not a number from a blog post. For aggregate baselines across niches, our link building statistics hub is a useful sanity check, and the link pricing index helps you understand what placements at a given quality actually cost.

For the underlying vocabulary, the anchor text glossary entry, and its section on anchor types, are worth a one-minute read if any term here was new. And for the wider strategy that ties all of this together, start from the anchors pillar.

A practical workflow you can run today

1. Export your current backlink profile and tag every anchor as branded, URL, generic, partial, or exact. Most tools do this in an Anchors tab automatically.
2. For your homepage, confirm branded plus URL plus generic is the clear majority. If exact-match is above 5 percent, your next ten links should be branded or URL anchors to dilute it.
3. For each money page, find the single most-used exact-match phrase. If it is over about 10 percent of that page's links, stop building that phrase and switch to variations and partial matches.
4. Audit your internal links to money pages. Replace lazy click here and read more anchors with descriptive, keyword-rich ones. This is free ranking signal you are leaving on the table.
5. Before any new external campaign, benchmark the live top five for your target query and match their distribution, not a generic template.

If you want a second opinion on whether your current profile is too hot, the fastest path is to run the numbers rather than eyeball them. A skewed exact-match concentration on the homepage is the one issue worth fixing before anything else, because it is both the most common and the most damaging.