Anchor text

What Google says about anchor text

Google's link documentation puts it in one line: "Anchor text (also known as link text) is the visible text of a link. This text tells people and Google something about the page you're linking to." Good anchor text, it adds, is "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to", and its examples of what to avoid are "Click here" and "Read more" (Link best practices for Google).

Two fallbacks follow from that. When a link has no text, Google "can use the title attribute as anchor text", and for an image used as a link it "uses the alt attribute of the img element as anchor text". The same page warns against the opposite excess: "resist the urge to cram every keyword that's related to the page that you're linking to (remember, keyword stuffing is a violation of our spam policies)."

The five anchor types

SEO tools sort anchors into a handful of types, using the page's target query as the reference. Take this page and the query "anchor text":

Exact match. The anchor is the target query itself: "anchor text". It sends the clearest topical signal, and a profile full of them is the classic sign of links someone placed rather than earned.

Partial match. The query sits inside a longer phrase or a variation: "how anchor text works", "choosing link text". Ahrefs splits this group in two: phrase match contains the exact query plus other words, partial match contains all its words but not as one phrase (Ahrefs).

Branded. The anchor is a brand or site name: "Angle". It is how people usually cite a source, which is why earned profiles lean on it.

Naked URL. The address itself is the anchor: "angletutoring.com/glossary/anchor-text". Common in forums, social posts and press releases, where nobody writes link text.

Generic. Text that says nothing about the destination: "click here", "this article", "read more". Ahrefs calls these random anchors. Google advises against them for your own links, but other sites use them all the time.

How to mix them on links you control is covered in anchor text ratios and branded vs exact-match anchors, with worked cases in anchor text examples.

What a study of 384,614 ranking pages found

Ahrefs looked at the anchors of the backlinks pointing to 384,614 pages ranking in the top 20 for 19,840 keywords (Anchor Text: A Data-Driven Guide). Two findings stand out. The median share of exact-match anchors was zero at every ranking position: most pages that rank, including at #1, have no exact-match backlinks at all. And the correlation between the share of keyword anchors and rankings was weak, as the figure below shows. Generic anchors showed no correlation at all.

Link builders still reach for keywords when they choose the anchor. In Editorial.Link's survey of 518 SEO professionals, partial-match anchors are the first choice of 41.7%, ahead of exact match (25.1%) and branded anchors (20.5%) (Editorial.Link).

On internal links the picture is different. In Zyppy's study of 23 million internal links, pages with at least one exact-match anchor from an internal link had at least five times more traffic than pages without one, and the link between the variety of internal anchors pointing at a page and its Google clicks was so strong that Zyppy ran the data three times (Zyppy). These are correlations measured with the tools' own data, not proof that changing an anchor moves a ranking.

Over-optimization and Penguin

Over-optimization means pushing a signal that helps in moderation, most often exact-match anchors, until the profile no longer looks like anything people would write on their own. If a large share of the links to a page use the same commercial phrase, the imbalance itself is the signal.

In April 2012 Google launched the update later named Penguin against webspam "from keyword stuffing to link schemes", and said it affected "about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice" (Google Search Central blog, 2012). Keyword-stuffed anchors on bought links were its best-known target.

Since September 2016 Penguin has been part of Google's core algorithm. It now runs in real time and, in Google's words, "devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site" (Google Search Central blog, 2016). An over-optimized anchor profile today is more likely to be ignored than to sink a whole site, though a manual action for unnatural links remains possible.

Ahrefs notes that most SEOs recommend keeping exact-match anchors to roughly 1% to 5% of a profile. That is a rule of thumb from practitioners, not a number from Google.

Anchor text on internal links

Internal links are the one place you write every anchor yourself. Google says that paying attention to the anchor text of internal links "can help both people and Google make sense of your site more easily and find other pages on your site" (Google). Asked about internal anchors, John Mueller advised using "reasonable anchor text" and doing what "makes sense for your users" (Search Engine Journal). In practice: describe the destination, vary the wording across pages, and skip "click here". More in anchor text for internal links.

How to see the anchor text pointing to your site

Google Search Console's Links report includes a "Top linking text" table, the most common text in links to your site (Links report, Search Console Help). It is a sample, and it does not say which links are nofollow. Backlink tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush show anchors per link; the best backlink tools compares them. To check whether one link is live and followed, use the free link checker.