Anchor text: types, examples, exact-match risk and how to write good links

What anchor text is

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. In <a href="/guides/niche-edits/">how niche edits work</a>, the anchor text is “how niche edits work”. It tells readers what they'll get if they click, and helps search engines understand what the linked page is about. For an image used as a link, Google uses the image's alt text as the anchor.^[1]

What Google recommends

Google's link best-practices page is short and specific. The key points, quoted:

• “Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to.”
• “Try reading only the anchor text (out of context) and check if it's specific enough to make sense by itself.”
• “Write as naturally as possible, and resist the urge to cram every keyword that's related to the page that you're linking to.”
• “Don't chain up links next to each other; it's harder for your readers to distinguish between links, and you lose surrounding text for each link.”

Its examples of weak anchors include generic text like “Click here”, “Read more” and “website”, and anchors so long they become a whole sentence.^[1]

Types of anchor text

Using a fictional project-management company, “Taskline”, linking to its page about Gantt charts:

Exact-match anchors and risk

An exact-match anchor uses the precise query you want to rank for: “best project management software” pointing at your product page. Editors rarely write links like that naturally. People link with your name, your URL, or a description of what they found useful.

That's why a link profile full of exact-match commercial anchors looks engineered, and why Google's spam policy calls out “links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites” when they pass ranking credit.^[2]

Internal vs external links

Anchor text on your own site is entirely in your control and is where descriptive, keyword-relevant anchors are most natural. Google recommends that “every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site,” and notes “there's no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain.” ^[1]

Anchor text on other sites should be what that site's editor would naturally write. When you're suggesting anchors for guest posts or placements, lean towards brand and descriptive anchors.

Planning anchors for link building

1. Start with the target page, not the keyword. What would someone call this page if they recommended it?
2. Write three to five natural variations: brand, URL, and two or three descriptive phrases.
3. Let context lead. The sentence around the link should make the anchor make sense.
4. Avoid repeating the same commercial phrase across many placements.
5. Log every anchor with its target and placement, so you can see the pattern you're creating.

If you're running outreach yourself, our blogger outreach process covers how to suggest anchors to editors without dictating them.

Good and bad examples

Checklist

• Does the anchor make sense read on its own?
• Is it concise, without being generic?
• Does it describe the linked page accurately?
• Would an independent editor plausibly write it?
• Is the surrounding sentence useful to the reader?
• If the link is paid, is it qualified with sponsored?^[1]

Related reading: what Google's policy says about paid links and why there's no magic number of backlinks.