Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link — the words between the <a> tags. It matters because it's one of the clearest hints Google gets about what the destination page is about, and because over-optimizing it externally is one of the oldest, best-documented ways to buy yourself a link spam problem.
What a natural anchor profile looks like
Pull the anchor report for almost any site that earned its links honestly and you'll see the same shape. The biggest buckets are branded anchors ("SEO ProCheck"), naked URLs ("seoprocheck.com"), and generic phrases ("this study", "read more", "their data"). Partial-match anchors ("a good content audit walkthrough") show up in the middle. Exact-match commercial anchors ("best seo audit tool") are a sliver — because real people linking from real articles almost never write them.
That shape is the tell. A profile where exact-match commercial anchors dominate looks manufactured, because it is — nobody links that way by accident. Our anchor text distribution study digs into the natural-versus-optimized contrast in detail.
One crucial split before anything else: internal and external anchors play by different rules. On your own site, descriptive and even exact-match anchors are just good navigation — you're telling users and crawlers what the target page is. It's external anchors, the ones other sites use to link at you, where an engineered pattern becomes a liability.
Anchor types: value and risk
| Anchor type | Example | Value | Risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Branded | "SEO ProCheck" | Builds entity association; backbone of a natural profile | None |
| Naked URL | "seoprocheck.com" | Neutral, natural filler | None |
| Generic | "click here", "this post" | Natural in editorial prose | Zero relevance signal — wasteful when it's every internal link |
| Page title / long descriptive | "how to run a content audit that moves traffic" | High clarity for users and crawlers | Negligible |
| Partial match | "a solid guide to auditing content" | Relevance without pattern-matching as spam | Low at natural frequency |
| Exact match (internal) | "content audit" → your content audit page | Clear topical signal; standard practice | Low — unless it's sitewide boilerplate |
| Exact match (external, at scale) | 500 external links all saying "best seo tool" | Short-term movement, historically | High — classic link spam footprint |
| Image link (alt as anchor) | alt="content audit spreadsheet template" | Alt text serves as the anchor | Empty alt = a link that says nothing |
How to check it on your own site
- Crawl with Screaming Frog and export Bulk Export → Links → All Inlinks. Pivot the anchor column: if "read more" or "click here" tops the list, your internal linking is telling Google nothing.
- Check your key pages individually. For each money page, list every internal anchor pointing at it. You want varied, descriptive anchors — not one phrase stamped 400 times from a sidebar widget.
- Pull external anchors from Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz (or Search Console's links report, which shows top linking text for free). Eyeball the shape against the table above.
- Find the empty ones. Filter your crawl for image links with missing alt text and links whose anchor is whitespace — each is a wasted signal. Our automated check for non-descriptive anchor text flags these at scale.
- Fix the internal side first. It's fully under your control and takes an afternoon; external cleanup is slower and rarely urgent unless you (or a previous agency) actually built spammy links.
Common anchor text mistakes (and fixes)
- "Click here" as the house style. Accessible-ish, informative to no one. Fix: make the anchor describe the destination — "our internal linking guide", not "here".
- Sitewide identical anchors from templates. A footer or sidebar link repeats on every page, drowning your editorial anchors in boilerplate. Fix: keep template links, but do your real anchor work in body copy.
- Exact-match everything to the money page. Fifty internal links, one identical phrase — robotic and wasteful when variations could cover more query space. Fix: rotate natural variants of the target topic.
- Ignoring image links. A linked image with empty alt is an anchor that says nothing. Fix: crawl for them, write descriptive alt text.
- Buying links with keyword anchors. The one pattern Google's link spam systems have been trained on for two decades. Fix: don't. If it already happened, dilute with genuinely earned brand links before reaching for disavow.
FAQ
What's the ideal percentage of exact-match anchors?
Nobody outside Google has that number, and anyone quoting "keep exact match under X%" invented X. The defensible answer: earn links naturally and the ratio takes care of itself, because natural profiles skew heavily branded and generic.
Does anchor text matter for internal links?
Yes — arguably it's where you have the most leverage, since you control every word. Descriptive internal anchors help Google associate pages with topics and help users decide whether to click. See our internal linking study on anchor text and placement for what the data shows.
Can other sites hurt me with bad anchors?
A competitor pointing spammy anchors at you is almost always ignored by Google's systems rather than held against you. Disavow is a last resort for sites with a genuine manual action or a history of paid links — not routine hygiene.
Do anchors still matter now that Google understands context?
Google reads the text around a link too, but the anchor remains the most concentrated relevance signal a link carries. "Understands context" means sloppy anchors hurt less — not that good ones stopped helping.
Should anchor text match the target page's title exactly?
It can, but it doesn't need to. Aim for anchors that would make sense to a human deciding whether to click. Our guide to anchor text best practices covers the patterns worth copying.
Claude Vincent is a technical SEO consultant focused on crawlability, rendering, and AI-search visibility. He writes the field guides and case studies at SEO ProCheck, with a bias toward the durable, unglamorous work that decides whether search engines and AI answer engines can actually read and cite a site.
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Technical SEO consulting and GEO strategy with 20 years of enterprise experience. Case studies, resources, and tools for search and AI visibility.
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