Anchor text best practices for SEO

Anchor text is the most-studied and most-misunderstood off-page signal. Studies tracking ranking changes after Google's Penguin algorithm rolled out in 2012 showed that sites with backlink profiles where 30%+ of anchors were exact-match keyword phrases lost rankings overnight. Sites with backlink profiles dominated by "click here," brand names, and bare URLs survived. This is counter-intuitive: the SEOs who optimized hardest got penalized hardest.

This guide skips the "what is anchor text" framing (the tool below covers that) and goes straight to the workflow: the natural-distribution rule, when exact-match anchors are a liability, and the audit move for spotting backlink profiles that have drifted into over-optimization territory.

Audit any page's anchor text right now

Paste any URL below. The tool extracts every <a> tag with its anchor text and destination - the fastest way to spot generic anchors ("click here" repeated 40 times), keyword-stuffed internal links, and pages that link to the same destination from multiple anchor variants.

The natural-distribution rule (and why over-optimization tanks rankings)

Google's anchor-text scoring has been the subject of more leaked-document, patent-filing, and outsider-reverse-engineering research than almost any other ranking input. The synthesis: Google models the EXPECTED distribution of anchors pointing at a URL based on the URL's content, brand, and authority - and penalizes URLs whose actual distribution deviates too far from that model.

What an "expected" distribution looks like for an organically-grown site:

• 40-60% branded anchors. Site name, company name, partial brand variants. "SEOGraphy," "the SEOGraphy team," "SEOGraphy.io." This is what real journalists, partners, and customers do when they link to you.
• 15-25% naked URLs. "https://seography.io/learn/anchor-text" pasted in a forum reply, a tweet, a comments section. Real linking behaviour.
• 10-20% generic anchors. "Click here," "this article," "their guide," "read more." These are content-management-system defaults; 100% of organically-grown link profiles have them.
• 5-15% partial-match keyword anchors. "the anchor text playbook," "a great guide on anchor text," "their anchor text article." Topical, descriptive, but not exact match.
• 1-5% exact-match keyword anchors. "anchor text best practices." Very rare in organic linking - most journalists don't write that way.

An over-optimized profile looks like this: 40% exact-match, 20% partial-match, 30% branded, 10% other. The keyword-anchor share is where the penalty triggers. Google's pattern-detection treats any URL with >25% exact-match anchor share as paid / manipulated linking.

This is why the SEO advice "ask for backlinks with your target keyword as the anchor" produces predictable Penguin penalties. The pattern is too clean to be organic.

The four kinds of anchor text and when each is appropriate

Branded anchors

The safest, highest-volume anchor type. Use them in 40-60% of your inbound link requests, in 80%+ of your internal "from the home / nav / footer" links, and as the default for press mentions. There is no over-optimization risk on branded anchors because Google expects most of your inbound links to use the brand.

Naked URLs

Underrated. A backlink with anchor text "https://yourdomain.com/page" is signal-rich (it tells Google the link is voluntary, often pasted by a real person) and zero-risk (no over-optimization potential). Encourage forum mentions, tweet shares, and Reddit comments - they all default to naked URLs.

Generic anchors ("click here," "this article")

Get a bad rap in old SEO advice. Reality: every organically-grown site has 10-20% generic anchors and Google expects this. Don't filter them out of guest-post linking guides; don't aggressively rewrite them on internal links if they read naturally in context. A site with zero generic anchors looks more manipulated than a site with too many.

Keyword anchors (partial-match and exact-match)

The dangerous category. Useful in moderation, penalty-triggering at scale. The decision rule:

• Keep partial-match keyword anchors under 15% of your inbound link profile. "guide on anchor text" or "the anchor text article" is fine; "anchor text" alone gets risky.
• Keep exact-match anchors under 5% of your inbound link profile. Real organic linking produces about this many; anything more is a signal of paid / outreach campaigns.
• Internal links can be slightly more keyword-aligned (15-25% partial-match across the site) because they're under your control and Google factors that in. But keep the same exact-match URL from being linked with the same exact-match anchor >5 times across the site.

The biggest mistake: outreach campaigns that ask for the same anchor text

The single most common way teams blow up their anchor profile: an outreach campaign template that says "please link to https://yourdomain.com/blog/anchor-text-guide using the anchor text 'anchor text guide.'" A successful 50-link campaign produces 50 backlinks with the same anchor. Penguin sees a 50/X% spike in exact-match anchor density and penalizes the URL.

The audit move:

1. Map your inbound anchor distribution using a backlink tool (Ahrefs / Majestic / Semrush). Filter to the URL whose rankings you want to protect, group by anchor text, sort by frequency. The top 10 anchors should look diverse - not 8 of them being "[your target keyword]."
2. Calculate the exact-match anchor share. Sum the inbound links whose anchor IS your target keyword. Divide by total inbound links. If the share is >5%, you have over-optimization risk; if >15%, you have a likely active suppression.
3. Brief outreach campaigns to USE different anchors. The five-anchor diversification rule: any outreach asking for >5 backlinks to the same URL must request anchors split across (a) brand variants, (b) naked URL, (c) generic anchors, (d) partial-match topical, (e) at most one exact-match. Build the diversification into the outreach template.
4. For an existing penalized URL, dilute the anchor profile by acquiring branded and naked-URL backlinks aggressively. Target 3-5 organic-feeling backlinks for every existing exact-match one until the ratio drops below 5%.

What a clean anchor-text audit looks like

Run this on the top 20% of your URLs by inbound traffic, plus on every URL that is the target of an active outreach campaign.

1. Pull inbound link data from a backlink tool. Filter to one URL at a time; export the anchor-text breakdown.
2. Categorize each anchor into branded, naked URL, generic, partial-match keyword, exact-match keyword. Aim for the distribution: 40-60% branded, 15-25% naked URL, 10-20% generic, 5-15% partial-match, 1-5% exact-match.
3. Run the page through the anchor text checker to audit the OUTBOUND anchors on your site. The destination URL of each link should be appropriate for its anchor; "click here" linked to your pricing page is wasted equity.
4. Audit internal-link anchor consistency. If you link to the same destination from 50 different pages, the anchor variants should look like real editorial linking - not "[exact target keyword]" repeated 50 times. Vary internal anchors as you would inbound ones.
5. Spot-check competitor anchor profiles for benchmarking. If you rank #5 for a query and the page at #1 has an inbound profile dominated by branded + naked anchors with <3% exact-match, your strategy is to look more like that and less like the keyword-anchored alternatives.
6. Re-test 4-8 weeks after diversification. Anchor-related ranking suppression takes weeks to lift after the ratio normalizes - this is not a fix-it-Friday-rank-on-Monday change.

Quick quiz: are you ready to audit your own anchor text?

Five questions, takes two minutes. We'll show you the right answer and a one-line explanation after each one.

Next up in Off-Page SEO

Inbound anchor text shapes how Google reads your URLs from outside. Internal linking shapes how Google reads them from inside. From here:

• Internal linking strategy - how to plan a site's link architecture so PageRank flows where it earns rank.
• External links and authority - when outbound links help (and when they hurt).
• Nofollow / sponsored / UGC link rels - the right rel for the right link.
• Finding and fixing broken links - the cleanup workflow that recovers lost equity at scale.