Anchor text

A link makes two promises: to the person deciding whether to click, and to the crawler deciding what the destination is about. Anchor text is the only part of a link that speaks to both, which is why it has carried weight since the earliest days of link-based ranking.

The useful test is whether the anchor would still make sense read out of context. "Our pricing" does. "Here" does not, and neither does "read more", which is the most common anchor on the web and the least informative.

That test is not a search trick. It is exactly how screen reader users navigate: pulling up a list of every link on the page and reading down it. A list of twelve identical entries is a page that cannot be navigated, and it is the same defect a crawler sees.

Anchor text is one of the oldest ranking signals and one of the oldest abused ones, so the systems assessing it have been trained on two decades of manipulation. The consequence is that the distribution matters as much as the individual anchors.

Links people place naturally produce a messy profile: the brand name, the bare URL, the title of the page, a fragment of a sentence, "this guide", the occasional exact keyword. Links placed to rank produce a tidy one, and tidy is the tell.

There is no published threshold, and any agency quoting a precise percentage is inventing it. The practical version is directional: if an external anchor profile is dominated by one commercial phrase, that is not a profile anybody earned.

The asymmetry worth knowing is that this risk sits almost entirely on external links, the ones you do not control. Which is an argument for spending the effort on internal linking, where nothing looks manufactured because nothing is being manufactured.

Every internal link on a client site is an anchor you write, and most sites waste them. Navigation and buttons carry generic labels by necessity, but body copy is where the descriptive ones live, and body copy is where they are usually missing.

The glossary pattern is the clean example. An article that mentions a term links it to the definition, with the term itself as the anchor. It is descriptive, it is relevant, it helps a reader who did not know the word, and it tells a crawler exactly what the destination covers. Nothing about it is a tactic.

The one thing to avoid is doing it mechanically. Linking the same phrase to the same page from every article on the site reads as automation, because it is, and it stops being a signal that a human chose to place it.

Image links are the anchors most often forgotten. When a link wraps an image with no text, the alt text is the anchor, so an empty alt on a linked image is a link with no anchor at all.

When a placement is negotiated, the anchor is usually negotiable too, and agencies routinely ask for the exact keyword because it is the most obviously valuable thing to ask for. Asking for the brand name or the page title is often the better trade: it is easier for the publisher to agree to, it reads naturally in their copy, and it does not push the profile toward the shape described above.

For editorial coverage, asking at all is usually a mistake. A journalist who has been told what words to link is aware of why, and the request can cost the placement.

Where an agency can be unambiguously useful is in the client style guide. "Never use click here" and "link the thing, not the word here" are two rules that improve the site for readers, for accessibility and for search at the same time, and they cost nothing once written down.