SEO anchor text: the seven types, the internal rules, and how to audit the profile you already have

Anchor text is the clickable words in a link, and it tells both the reader and the search engine what the page at the other end is about. For internal links you control it completely, so write it as the plain description of the destination: "anchor text best practice", not "click here". For external links pointing at you, the pattern across your whole profile is what matters, and a natural profile is mixed: brand names, bare URLs, article titles, partial phrases and the occasional exact match. The practical rule is simple. Describe the destination accurately, vary the wording the way real writers do, and never buy a link that comes with the anchor text written for you.

This page covers the anchor types, how to write internal anchors, what a healthy external profile looks like, how to audit yours and how to fix an over optimised one. For the value of a link itself, see what makes a backlink valuable.

The anchor types, with examples

Type	Example pointing at a page about anchor text	Where it belongs
Exact match	seo anchor text	Sparingly, where it reads naturally, mostly internal
Partial match	how to write anchor text well	The workhorse for internal links
Branded	the company name on its own	Natural in editorial coverage and author bios
Naked URL	www.example.com/anchor-text	Forums, documentation, citations
Title or headline	Anchor text: the types and the audit	Press coverage and roundups
Generic	read more, this guide	Acceptable in flowing copy, but say what the guide is about nearby
Image link	alt text acts as the anchor	Logos, diagrams, thumbnails

One important detail: when a link is an image, the alt attribute is the anchor. Logo links across a site are often the most repeated anchor a domain has, and an empty alt wastes it.

Internal anchors: where the real gains are

Internal links are the part of this you fully control, and most sites leave value on the table. Six rules that hold up:

• Describe the destination, not the context. The anchor should make sense read on its own, out of the sentence.
• Use the words people search for. If a page targets a phrase, internal anchors are the clearest way to confirm that is the page for it.
• Vary the wording across links. Twenty internal links with identical anchors read as a template. Natural variation also catches more phrasings.
• Keep anchors short. Two to five words is usually enough. A whole sentence as an anchor dilutes the signal and is harder to read.
• Link from relevant body copy, not only from navigation. A link inside a paragraph that is about the same topic carries more meaning than one in a sidebar that appears on every page.
• Point at the canonical version. Link to the final URL, with the right protocol, the right subdomain and no tracking parameters, so you are not passing signals through a redirect.

One anchor text decision worth making once: pick the single page that owns each important phrase and make every internal anchor for that phrase point at it. Two pages competing for one phrase is the most common cause of both of them sitting at position nine. Our guide to internal linking structure and the audit that finds the gaps covers the site wide version of that job.

What a healthy external profile looks like

You do not control how other people link to you, and that is the point: the distribution of anchors is itself a signal of whether the links were earned. Real profiles are dominated by brand names and page titles, with a long tail of odd phrasings, bare URLs and generic words. What looks engineered is a high share of identical commercial anchors, especially from unrelated sites, published close together in time.

Google's spam policies name keyword rich anchor text in paid or distributed links as a link scheme, and they ask that paid, sponsored and user generated links carry the appropriate attribute, documented in its guidance on qualifying outbound links. Three consequences for practice:

• When someone offers you a link and asks what anchor you want, you are being sold a link. Judge it as a paid placement and mark it accordingly.
• In guest contributions, link to the most useful page with the most natural wording, usually the brand name or the title of a resource.
• Give journalists something with a name. A report, a dataset or a tool gets linked by its title, which is the healthiest anchor you can earn at scale.

How to audit your anchor text

• Pull the data. Any backlink tool with an anchors report will export linking domain, anchor text, target URL and first seen date. Do the same for internal links from a site crawl.
• Group by target URL. An over optimised pattern almost always concentrates on one or two money pages, so look page by page rather than site wide.
• Calculate the share of each anchor type per page. You are looking for a page where one commercial phrase dominates and brand anchors are nearly absent.
• Sort by first seen date. Clusters of identical anchors appearing within days of each other are the clearest fingerprint of a bought campaign, including one bought by a previous agency.
• Check the linking sites. Topic relevance and whether a real audience reads them matters more than any score. A relevant site with modest metrics beats a high scoring directory nobody visits.
• List your internal anchors for each target phrase. Fix the ones pointing at the wrong page before you do anything external.

Fixing an over optimised profile

1. Stop adding to it. End any programme that supplies the anchor text, and say so in writing to whoever is running it.
2. Rebalance what you control. Rewrite internal anchors so brand and partial match wording carries the load, and spread links across the supporting pages rather than all into one.
3. Earn the normalising links. New brand, title and URL anchors from relevant sources shift the distribution faster than removals do.
4. Request removal where it is realistic. Private blog networks and paid directories will sometimes remove on request. Keep a record of the attempt.
5. Use disavow narrowly. It is the right tool for a clear pattern of links you placed or inherited and cannot remove, and it is applied at the domain level with a written note of why.
6. Re measure in a month. Pull the same anchors report, compare the distribution and record the change. Keep it on a monthly cycle so you are always reading current data.

Asked and answered: SEO anchor text

What percentage of my anchors should be exact match?

Use the distribution of three or four respected competitors in your category as your reference point rather than a universal number: pull their anchors report, see how heavily brand and title anchors dominate, and aim for the same shape. Profiles that chase a fixed percentage are the ones that end up looking engineered.

Does "click here" hurt?

It passes up the chance to describe the destination, which is the cost. In flowing copy where the surrounding sentence already names the topic, it reads naturally and does no harm. For a link you want to count, use words that describe the page.

Do nofollow and sponsored links still need good anchor text?

Write them for the reader, because that is who clicks them. They also appear in the text that assistants and search engines read when they describe your brand, so accurate wording keeps the description of you accurate.

How many internal links should point at one page?

Enough that the page is reachable from the relevant parts of the site, which for an important page usually means links from its topic cluster, from the hub page above it and from the navigation if it earns a place there. Judge by whether a reader on a related page would find it useful, not by a target count.

Does anchor text matter for links in a PDF or a document?

Yes, where the file is crawlable. Write descriptive link text in the document and link to live URLs rather than to redirects, since those links are read the same way as links in a web page.

The description of you that anchors help write

Anchors are short descriptions of a page, written by other people, and a model reading the web picks up those descriptions along with everything else. When a buyer asks an assistant what your company is known for, the phrase it uses may echo the words other sites used when they linked to you.

Read your anchor profile with that in mind, then ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to describe your business in one line and compare the two. The wording that comes back is rarely the wording on your own site. AI Knows Us lets you watch that description across assistants, so you can see which sources it is built from.