anchor text
Also called: link text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a hyperlink. It tells readers and search engines what the linked page is about, which is why descriptive anchor text aids navigation and gives Google a relevance signal about the destination page.
Anchor text does two jobs at once: it tells a reader where a link leads, and it gives search engines a relevance clue about the destination. Google’s guidance is to keep it descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to both the page it sits on and the page it points to.
Types and distribution
Practitioners sort anchors into buckets: exact match (the target keyword verbatim), phrase or partial match, branded, naked URL (the raw address), and generic like click here. For image links, Google reads the image’s alt attribute as the anchor, and it can fall back to a link’s title attribute when the visible text is empty.
Across a backlink profile, the mix matters more than any single link. After Google’s Penguin update in 2012, sites with an unnatural share of exact-match commercial anchors lost rankings, and Ahrefs’ study of 384,614 pages found exact-match anchors correlate only weakly with position. The safer play is not to engineer ratios at all: earn links and let the distribution stay natural.
Google offers a plain test for your own links. Read the anchor on its own. If you can’t tell where it leads, rewrite it, and resist cramming keywords, since keyword stuffing breaks Google’s spam policies. Descriptive anchors also help the AI systems now parsing your pages understand how your content connects.
How it affects your traffic
Anchor text is where link building goes right or wrong. A backlink profile weighted toward exact-match commercial anchors reads as manipulation and can suppress the very pages you want to rank, while a natural mix of branded, descriptive, and URL anchors builds authority without tripping a filter. Internally, descriptive anchors route relevance and equity toward your money pages. Our Link Building work earns links with anchor profiles that hold up over time, so the signals flow to the right destination instead of putting the site at risk.
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