Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It signals to search engines what the linked page is about and plays an important role in both internal linking and link building.
Reviewed by Alexander Yarovenko · Updated: 2026-09-18
What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the visible, clickable words in a hyperlink — the text displayed instead of the raw URL. In HTML: <a href="url">anchor text here</a>. Search engines use anchor text as a contextual signal: if thousands of links to a page say "best SEO tools", Google understands that page is about SEO tools.
Types of Anchor Text
| Type | Example | SEO Value |
|---|---|---|
| Exact match | "SEO tools" | High — but risky if over-used |
| Partial match | "best tools for SEO" | Good — natural variation |
| Branded | "Ahrefs", "Moz" | High — builds brand authority |
| Naked URL | "ahrefs.com" | Moderate — natural |
| Generic | "click here", "read more" | Low — no keyword signal |
| Image | (alt text of linked image) | Depends on alt text quality |
Anchor Text and Over-Optimisation
Google's Penguin algorithm (2012) targeted sites that manipulated rankings with unnatural anchor text profiles — especially excessive exact-match anchors. A healthy backlink profile has a natural mix of branded, partial-match, generic, and URL anchors, with exact-match anchors making up a small minority.
Best Practices for Internal Linking
- Use descriptive anchor text that reflects the target page's topic
- Avoid generic anchors ("click here") for internal links — these pass no context
- Vary anchor text naturally — don't repeat the same phrase for every link to a page
- Ensure anchor text is relevant to both the linking and linked page
How to use this concept in SEO
Anchor text should concisely describe the destination in the surrounding context. Internal anchors help users and Google understand relationships; repetitive forced exact-match anchors look unnatural and reduce readability.
Audit checklist
- Confirm that the implementation matches the page purpose and the user task.
- Check the HTTP response, rendered HTML, canonical, robots rules, and internal links together.
- Use Search Console and analytics to verify the result instead of relying on one crawler signal.
- Test a representative URL on mobile and desktop after deployment.
- Document the expected outcome so regressions can be detected in the next audit.
Practical example
A lesson links with “check canonical tags” to the canonical audit tool instead of vague text such as “click here”.
How to validate the result
Record the current crawl, indexation, performance, and traffic state before changing anything. Recheck the affected template and a representative URL after deployment, then monitor Search Console over the following crawl cycle. A technical change is complete only when the live response and Google’s observed state agree.