Anchor Text Ratios for Tiered Campaigns, Tier by Tier
Of all the signals that give away a manipulated link profile, anchor text is the one people damage most easily and most often. Natural links are messy. People link with your brand name, a bare URL, "this article", "here", or a phrase that only loosely describes your page. Purchased links tend to be tidy, and tidy is the problem.
The anchor types
Before talking about ratios, here are the categories most SEO tools use:
- Branded: your business name, e.g. "Sharma Sweets"
- Naked URL: "sharmasweets.in" or the full URL
- Generic: "click here", "read more", "this website", "source"
- Exact match: the precise keyword you want to rank for, e.g. "sweet shop in Jaipur"
- Partial match: a phrase containing part of the keyword, e.g. "their Jaipur sweet shop"
- Topical or related: a phrase on the same topic without your keyword, e.g. "traditional Rajasthani mithai"
- Image anchors: the alt text of a linked image
If you need a refresher on how these work, see anchor text explained.
Why ratios matter differently at each tier
The anchors pointing at your own website are the ones Google weighs when judging your site, so Tier 1 needs the most care. Tier 2 and Tier 3 anchors point at other pages, so they affect those pages and the overall pattern rather than your site directly. That changes what "natural" looks like at each level.
Tier 1: conservative
Look at the profile of a well-known brand in your niche that has mostly earned its links. You will usually find branded and URL anchors dominating, with generic anchors next, and exact match appearing only occasionally.
A reasonable starting range for Tier 1 on a small business site:
| Anchor type | Starting range |
|---|---|
| Branded | Largest share, often well over a third |
| Naked URL | A substantial share |
| Generic | A moderate share |
| Partial match and topical | A smaller share |
| Exact match | Very small, a few percent at most |
These are planning ranges based on what natural profiles tend to look like, not figures from Google. Your own niche may differ, which is why comparing with competitors is the better guide (more on that below).
Tier 2: describe the Tier 1 page
Tier 2 links point at guest posts, articles and other pages that link to you. Their anchors should describe those pages, not your business:
- The Tier 1 article's title or a variation
- The host site's name
- Generic anchors
- The Tier 1 URL
- Topical phrases related to the article's subject
You can use more keyword-related anchors here than at Tier 1, since the target is a content page about that topic. But if every Tier 2 link uses "best sweet shop in Jaipur" to point at a guest post titled "A Food Lover's Week in the Pink City", the mismatch is obvious.
Tier 3: mostly URLs and generic text
Tier 3 links are usually bulk links pointing at Tier 2 pages like web 2.0 posts or profiles. Keyword anchors make little sense here. Lean heavily on:
- Naked URLs
- Generic phrases
- Page titles
The aim at Tier 3 is crawling and indexing, which needs no keyword in the anchor at all.
Use competitors as your benchmark
Generic ratios are a starting point. A better approach is to look at the anchor distribution of three to five pages that rank well for your target keyword. Export their anchors from a backlink tool, group them into the categories above and see what share each takes. If the top results have almost no exact-match anchors, that is a strong hint about what works in your niche.
Auditing your current mix
Before planning new links, check where you are now. Export your backlinks, paste the anchors into the anchor text analyzer and look for:
- One commercial phrase making up a large share of all anchors
- Exact-match anchors outnumbering branded ones
- Many identical anchors from different domains
If you find any of these, your next Tier 1 links should be branded and URL anchors until the balance looks normal again.
A worked example
A Pune-based CA firm wants to rank for "GST registration consultant Pune". Its current profile has 40 referring domains, and 12 of them use that exact phrase. That is heavy for a small profile.
The plan for the next three months:
- Tier 1: twelve new links, nearly all branded, URL or generic; perhaps one partial match ("their GST registration service")
- Tier 2: anchors based on each guest post's title and topic, a few partial matches
- Tier 3: URLs and generic only
The exact-match share falls as the profile grows, without needing to remove anything.
Common anchor mistakes in tiered campaigns
- Using the same anchor list across all three tiers
- Pushing your money keyword through Tier 2 and Tier 3 because "it's not pointing at my site"
- Ignoring anchors from links you did not build (they still count toward the overall mix)
- Never rechecking the distribution as the campaign grows
Make it part of your routine
Export your current anchors, run them through the analyzer and write down the share of exact-match anchors. If it is higher than the top-ranking pages in your niche, make your next ten Tier 1 links branded or URL anchors before you plan anything else. For the wider campaign setup, see how to plan a tiered link structure.