Anchor text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable part of a link. In the sentence you are reading, the words somebody chose to wrap around a link are its anchor text, and they are the only part of the link that says anything about where it goes. Search engines have used those words to understand destination pages since almost the beginning, and they still do.

In short

• It is the clickable wording of a link, and it describes the destination.
• Click here wastes the link, because it describes nothing.
• Repeating one commercial phrase everywhere is the clearest sign of arranged links.
• You fully control the wording inside your own site, so start there.

Why the words carry weight

A link is a recommendation. The anchor text is the sentence attached to it.

When a page links out with the words “aircon cleaning in Cebu”, it has told the search engine something it could not otherwise be certain of: that the page on the other end is about aircon cleaning, in Cebu, according to somebody who is not the owner of that page. Third-party description has always counted for more than self-description, which is exactly why this small piece of a link matters more than its size suggests.

The kinds you will see described

Tools and agencies sort anchors into buckets. The names vary and the categories are consistent.

• Exact match. The phrase you want to rank for, word for word.
• Partial match. The phrase inside a longer, more natural sentence.
• Branded. Your business name.
• Naked. The address itself, printed as a link.
• Generic. Click here, read more, this page.

A real profile contains all five, weighted heavily towards branded and generic, because that is how people write when nobody is coordinating them.

Where over-optimisation starts

Google has targeted manipulative anchor text specifically for more than a decade, and this is the part of the subject with actual risk attached, so it is worth being precise about what the risk is. The pattern it looks for is not one exact-match link, it is a profile where an implausible share of inbound links all use the same commercial phrasing. Nobody writes that way by accident, which is the whole signal.

The usual consequence is quieter than people expect. The links stop counting. Something that was doing work stops doing it, the rankings drift back, and there is no message explaining why. That is harder to diagnose than a penalty would be.

Inbound wording is mostly not yours

Links from other sites will describe you however the writer felt like describing you, and the distinction between what you control and what you do not decides where effort is worth spending. Most will use your business name or the page title, some will use a fragment of the sentence they were writing, and a few will say “here”. You can ask, and asking for a specific commercial phrase is both unlikely to work and unwise if it does. A natural phrase is the better request, and it is a request you can only make of somebody who was already going to link to you, which is a backlink problem before it is a wording one.

Inside your own site, be deliberate

Here the wording is entirely yours, and most sites waste it.

Navigation links, body links and footer links all carry anchor text, and search engines read all of them. A site whose service pages are reached only through a menu item saying “Services” has described those pages to nobody. The same site linking from a sentence that names the service has described them precisely.

This is safe to do deliberately, because internal links are expected to be coordinated. Nobody is suspicious that your own site links to your own pages with sensible words. The mechanics of doing it well sit under internal links.

What Google does with it now

The mechanism is old enough that people assume it has been retired, and it has not. It has been made harder to game.

Anchor text still helps search engines understand a destination page, and it still helps them decide which of several similar pages is the better answer. What changed is that a signal which can be written by whoever wants to manipulate it now gets weighed against everything else on the page. One link saying you are the best plumber in Manila proves nothing. Forty links from unrelated sites saying it proves something, and not what the buyer intended.

The practical reading is that anchor text is worth getting right and is not worth engineering. Those are different activities, and the line between them is roughly whether you would be comfortable explaining the pattern to somebody.

The accessibility half of the same rule

The advice does not change and the reason for it doubles.

People using screen readers frequently navigate by pulling up a list of every link on a page, read out of context. In that list, four links reading “read more” are four identical entries with no way to tell them apart. The same page written with descriptive anchors becomes navigable.

That is worth knowing because it settles the argument differently. Descriptive link text is not an optimisation you are doing for a search engine. It is ordinary good writing that a search engine also happens to reward.

What to do about the links you already have

Nobody needs to audit thousands of links. Two passes cover most of the value, and the first is to look at the pages you most want to rank and ask how the rest of your site links to them. If the answer is a menu item and nothing else, add links from the pages where the subject naturally comes up, worded the way somebody would say it. Then look at any image used as a link, particularly logos and banners, and check the alt text is not empty.

Neither takes long. Both are entirely within your control, which is more than can be said for most of what affects rankings.