Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable words that carry a hyperlink from one page to another. It gives readers a clue about the destination and signals to search engines what the linked page is about, which is why the wording matters for both usability and ranking.

Types of anchor text

• Exact-match — the target keyword itself, e.g. "trail running shoes".
• Partial-match — the keyword inside a phrase, e.g. "these lightweight trail shoes".
• Branded — a brand name, e.g. "Salomon".
• Naked URL — the raw address, e.g. "example.com/shoes".
• Generic — "click here" or "read more": clear to a person, near-useless to a crawler.

Anchor text and link risk

Because anchor text is such a strong relevance signal, it was also heavily abused, and Google's Penguin update now scrutinises unnatural patterns. A backlink profile where 60% of external links use the exact phrase "buy cheap car insurance" looks manufactured; a healthy profile is mostly branded and naked-URL anchors, with exact-match a small minority. As a rough sanity check: if your money-keyword anchors dominate your inbound links, you're carrying risk, not authority.

For links you control inside your own site, descriptive anchors also strengthen internal linking and help people navigate. If you're building external links, our link building team keeps anchor distribution natural by design.