TL;DR
- Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It tells readers and search engines what the linked page is about before anyone clicks.
- Branded and descriptive anchors are the safest choices for backlinks. Generic anchors like "click here" waste the signal.
- Too many exact-match keyword anchors pointing at one page can look manipulative. Google has penalized that pattern since the 2012 Penguin update.
- Internal links are where you have full control, so that's where precise, descriptive anchor text pays off most.
- Audit both sides: backlink anchors in Ahrefs or Semrush, internal anchors with a site crawl. Fix generic, duplicate and over-optimized anchors first.
What Is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It's the words you click, usually shown in blue or underlined.
Here's what it looks like in HTML:
<a href="https://example.com/internal-linking-guide">internal linking guide</a>The href is where the link goes. The words between the opening and closing tags, "internal linking guide," are the anchor text. That's the part readers see.
Anchor text shows up in three places: internal links between pages on your own site, backlinks from other sites to yours, and linked images, where the image's alt text plays the role of the anchor.
Why Anchor Text Matters for SEO
A link says "this page is worth visiting." The anchor text says what it's about.
Search engines use those words as a clue to the linked page's topic. Readers use them to decide whether to click. Google's own link guidance asks for anchor text that's descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it points to.
Its weight in rankings has changed a lot over time, though. In Google's early years, anchor text was a heavy ranking signal. Point enough links with the anchor "cheap car insurance" at a page and it would climb, whatever the page actually said. Spammers figured this out fast.
Google fought back. The Penguin update in 2012 targeted manipulative link patterns, including unnatural volumes of keyword-stuffed anchors. Since then, aggressive exact-match anchor building has been a risk, not a shortcut.
So does anchor text still matter? Ahrefs studied this in 2019, looking at anchor text across 19,840 keywords and at the text around links on 16,000 pages. They found some correlation between keyword-rich anchors and rankings, but Ahrefs itself flagged the studies as potentially flawed and the correlations as weak. Treat the findings as directional, not as a formula.
One more detail most guides skip: the words around a link matter too. Search engines can read the surrounding sentence for context. A plain anchor inside a sentence that clearly describes the destination still sends a strong, natural signal.
Types of Anchor Text (With Examples)
Most anchor text falls into one of these types. Here's each one at a glance, using a page about "internal linking" as the example destination.
| Type | Example anchor | When to use it | Risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exact match | internal linking | Sparingly, mainly internal links | High in backlinks |
| Partial / phrase match | internal linking best practices | Natural, descriptive links | Low to medium |
| Branded | EverClif | Most backlinks | Low |
| Naked URL | everclif.com/blog/internal-linking | Citations, references | Low |
| Generic | click here, read more | Avoid where possible | Low risk, low value |
| Image | Alt text: "diagram of internal links" | Linked images | Low |
| Related | connecting your site's pages | Varying anchors naturally | Low |
| Compound | EverClif's internal linking guide | Brand plus topic | Low |
| Page title | How to Build Internal Links That Help SEO | Citing an article | Low |
Exact-Match Anchor Text
Same words as the target keyword. Nothing more, nothing less. If the page targets "internal linking," the anchor reads "internal linking."
This is the type that got abused in the early days, so it's the one to watch. A few exact-match anchors are normal. A backlink profile dominated by them looks engineered.
Partial-Match and Phrase-Match Anchor Text
A partial-match anchor includes a variation of the keyword, like "internal links for SEO." A phrase-match anchor holds the exact keyword inside a longer phrase, like "our guide to internal linking for B2B sites."
Both read naturally and still describe the destination clearly. For most links, this is the sweet spot.
Branded Anchor Text
"EverClif." "Ahrefs." "HubSpot." Just the name.
This is how most people naturally link to a company, which is why branded anchors are the safest type for backlinks. A healthy backlink profile usually has plenty of them.
Naked URL Anchor Text
Sometimes people just paste the address: "everclif.com" or the full URL. You'll see it most in citations, forum posts and resource lists. Natural and low-risk, but it says almost nothing about the page's topic.
Generic Anchor Text
"Click here." "Read more." "This article." "Learn more."
(If you've ever crawled a big blog, you know "read more" is everywhere. Many WordPress themes add it to every excerpt by default.)
Generic anchors won't get you penalized. They just waste the chance to tell readers and search engines anything useful. They also hurt accessibility, because screen reader users often scan a list of links, and twelve "read more" links in a row tell them nothing.
Image Anchor Text
When an image is linked, its alt text acts as the anchor text:
<a href="https://example.com/internal-linking-guide"><img src="links.png" alt="diagram of internal links between blog posts"></a>No alt text means no anchor. Write alt text that describes the image and, where it fits, the destination.
Related, Compound and Page-Title Anchor Text
Three smaller types round out the list. Related anchors use a synonym or close variation, like "connecting your site's pages" for an internal linking guide. Compound anchors combine a brand and a topic, like "EverClif's internal linking guide." Page-title anchors use the linked article's headline word for word.
All three help keep your anchor profile varied and natural.
Anchor Text Best Practices
Five rules cover most of it:
- Keep it natural. The anchor should fit the sentence. If you have to twist the wording to squeeze a keyword in, don't.
- Be succinct. A few words usually beat a whole sentence. Long anchors dilute the signal.
- Be descriptive. Someone should be able to guess the destination from the anchor alone.
- Match the linked page. The anchor sets an expectation, and the page should meet it. Misleading anchors cost you the reader's trust.
- Make links look clickable. Use color, underlines or both. A link nobody notices does nothing.
Here's the difference in practice:
| Do | Don't |
|---|---|
| See our guide to finding orphan pages. | To find orphan pages, click here. |
| Google's link best practices recommend descriptive anchors. | Google says this here. |
| Read more about B2B SEO strategy. | Best B2B SEO strategy agency services company |
| Anchor text on one page, anchor text types on another. | The same anchor, anchor text guide, pointing to two different pages. |
Anchor Text for Internal Links
Backlink anchors are mostly chosen by other people. Internal link anchors are entirely yours. That makes internal links the best place to get anchor text right.
Internally, you can be more precise than you'd ever want to be in backlinks. Descriptive anchors that closely match the target page's topic help search engines understand how your pages relate to each other. They also help readers move to the next useful page.
Watch for competing links. If the same anchor points to two different pages on your site, you're sending mixed signals about which page should rank for that topic. Pick one page per anchor phrase and stick to it.
How many internal links should a page have? There's no magic number, and anyone quoting one is guessing. A better test: could a reader reasonably want to go from this paragraph to that page? If yes, link it, with an anchor that says where they're going.
And remember the pages that get no internal links at all. An orphan page has no internal anchors pointing to it, so it gets zero context from the rest of your site. Mapping your internal links, for example with EverClif's free Internal Link Visualizer, makes both problems easier to spot.
Should You Optimize Anchor Text for Keywords?
Short answer: describe, don't optimize.
Topics matter more than exact keywords now. Search engines understand that "anchor text tips," "how to write link text" and "anchor text best practices" mean roughly the same thing. You don't need the exact keyword in every anchor to send a relevant signal.
The risk also runs one way. A handful of natural exact-match anchors won't hurt. A backlink profile packed with them can, and cleaning one up is slow, unglamorous work. You'll find "ideal anchor text ratios" quoted online, but there's no published Google threshold, so treat any specific percentage with suspicion.
Our view is simple. For backlinks, let anchors be mostly branded and descriptive, and don't ask partners for keyword-stuffed anchors. For internal links, be precise and descriptive, because that's where you control the signal and it can't be mistaken for manipulation.
How to Audit and Fix Anchor Text Issues
An anchor text audit has two halves: what other sites use to link to you, and what you use to link to yourself.
1. Check your backlink anchors. In Ahrefs (Site Explorer, then Anchors) or Semrush (Backlink Analytics, then Anchors), look at the spread of anchors pointing to your site. Mostly branded, naked and natural descriptive anchors is a healthy picture. A large share of identical commercial keywords is a warning sign.
2. Crawl your internal links. Run a crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and export every internal link with its anchor text. Sort by anchor.
3. Flag the problems. Look for four things:
- Generic anchors: "click here," "read more," "this post."
- Duplicate anchors pointing to different pages, which are competing links.
- Exact-match anchors repeated across many links to one page.
- Important pages with very few internal links, or none.
4. Fix in order of impact. Rewrite generic anchors into descriptive ones. Give each anchor phrase a single destination. Vary repeated exact-match anchors with partial-match and related wording. Add internal links to under-linked pages from relevant, well-linked ones.
Here's what that looks like on a real-world-sized site. Say you run a B2B SaaS blog with 120 posts. Your crawl shows 40 internal links using "read more," and the anchor "pricing" pointing to both your pricing page and your plans comparison page. The fixes are simple: rewrite the 40 generic anchors to describe each destination, and pick one page for "pricing" while the other gets a distinct anchor like "compare plans." An afternoon's work, and every one of those links now carries real context.
You can't edit anchors on other people's sites. If a backlink profile looks manipulative, the fix is usually to stop building those links, and in serious cases, to review Google's guidance on disavowing links.
Final Thoughts
Anchor text is a few words. It's also one of the clearest ways to tell a reader and a search engine what's waiting on the other side of a link.
Get the internal ones precise. Let the external ones stay natural. Audit both once in a while.
Write every link so that someone could guess the destination without clicking.