Anchor Text Explained: Types, Examples and a Safe Mix
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. In <a href="https://example.com/tours">Jaipur heritage walking tours</a>, the anchor text is "Jaipur heritage walking tours". Readers use it to decide whether to click. Google uses it as a clue about what the linked page covers.
That second use is why anchor text has been abused for as long as SEO has existed, and why it is one of the first things Google's spam systems look at.
The main types of anchor text
Imagine you run a walking-tour company at jaipurwalks.in and your target page is about heritage walking tours. Here is how each anchor type would look.
| Type | Example | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Branded | Jaipur Walks | Your business name. The most common anchor for real businesses. |
| Naked URL | jaipurwalks.in or https://jaipurwalks.in/tours | Very common when people cite a source quickly. |
| Exact match | heritage walking tours Jaipur | The precise keyword you want to rank for. Powerful and the easiest to overdo. |
| Partial match | a guided walk through Jaipur's old city | Contains part of the keyword or a close variant. |
| Branded + keyword | Jaipur Walks heritage tours | Brand plus a descriptive phrase. |
| Generic | click here, this site, read more | Says nothing about the topic. Normal in moderation. |
| Topical / contextual | this guide to the Pink City's stepwells | Describes the content without using the target keyword. |
| Image | (an image with alt text) | Google uses the image's alt text in place of anchor text. |
Why exact match anchors are risky
Before Google's Penguin update in 2012, sites could rank simply by collecting hundreds of links with the same keyword as anchor. Penguin targeted that pattern, and since then, a link profile heavy with exact-match anchors has been one of the clearest signs of manipulation.
Think about how real people link. A newspaper writing about your tours would say "Jaipur Walks" or "a local tour company". A blogger might write "this walk" or paste the URL. Almost nobody naturally types "best heritage walking tours Jaipur" as the link text. When most of your links do, the pattern is obvious.
What a natural mix looks like
There is no official ratio, and I'm sceptical of anyone who quotes exact percentages as if they came from Google. The best benchmark is the top-ranking pages in your own niche. Run a few of them through a backlink tool and look at their anchor distribution. In most niches you will see the same broad shape:
- Branded and naked URL anchors make up the bulk.
- Generic and topical anchors form a large slice.
- Exact match anchors are a small minority.
If your own profile looks very different from that shape, especially with a large share of exact match, slow down and diversify. The anchor text ratios for tiered campaigns article covers how people plan this when they are building links deliberately.
Anchor text on internal links
Internal links, the ones between pages on your own site, follow different rules. You control them completely, and Google expects you to use descriptive anchors to help visitors move around. Linking from your homepage to the tour page with "heritage walking tours" is good practice. You should still write anchors for humans, not repeat the identical phrase in every paragraph. See internal vs external links for more.
The text around the anchor matters too
Google looks at the words near a link, not only the anchor itself. A link with the anchor "Jaipur Walks" inside a paragraph about guided tours of Amer Fort and the old city carries plenty of topical context without any keyword in the anchor. This is one reason contextual backlinks are so useful: the surrounding sentences do the relevance work, and the anchor can stay natural.
How to check your current anchor profile
- Export your backlinks from a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz, or from Search Console's Links report (which shows top linking text).
- Group the anchors into the types in the table above.
- Look for any single keyword phrase that appears far more often than your brand name.
- Check which pages the exact-match anchors point to. If most go to one money page, that page is carrying the risk.
For a single page, you can paste its URL into the anchor text analyzer to see every link on it and the anchors used, which is handy when auditing a guest post or a placement before you approve it.
If your anchors are already over-optimised
Don't panic and don't mass-disavow. Most of the time the fix is to build new links with branded, URL and topical anchors so the overall mix becomes normal again. If you control some of the existing links (guest posts you wrote, profiles you set up), you can edit the anchors yourself. If you have a manual action for unnatural links in Search Console, that is a different situation and requires cleanup and a reconsideration request.
Start with this
Before your next link goes live, decide the anchor text yourself rather than leaving it to the publisher or seller. Default to your brand name or a topical phrase, and save exact-match anchors for the occasional link where the phrase reads naturally in the sentence.