Anchor Text

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text refers to the clickable, visible text that’s used in a hyperlink. In most cases, anchor texts are displayed in a different colour and can often be underlined for clarity.

As an example, in the phrase ‘read our glossary on SEO terms’, the word ‘glossary’ is the anchor text. While this seems like a trivial aspect of search engine optimisation, it’s one key signal that Google uses to interpret what the linked page is actually about. This means that anchor text can be both useful and easy to misuse.

Here’s another example:

Anchor Texts and Context

The logic that Google uses for anchor texts is simple. If lots of high-ranking sites are linking to a page using the words “running shoes,” the search engine frames its context around running shoes.

During the early days of SEO, the context provided by anchor texts was so powerful that it was exploited with terms like “buy cheap running shoes” in a bid to climb Google’s rankings. However, following Google’s Penguin update, the effectiveness of anchor texts was dialled down, meaning that over-optimised text couldn’t manipulate SERPs in quite the same way.

Types of Anchor Text

There are many different types of anchor text, and marketers can use a mix of them for different effects. With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at the different types of anchor text that can be used:

• Branded anchors: These focus solely on your company name.
• Naked URLs: This type of anchor text uses a link as it appears, like solvid.co.uk.
• Generic anchors: These refer to phrases like ‘click here’ or ‘read more.’
• Partial-match anchors: Generally a little more verbose, partial-match anchors include your keyword as well as other words, like “this guide to link building.”
• Exact-match anchors: This is the keyword on its own.

For most marketers, there’s a time and a place for all different types of anchor text, and finding a balance between them is a skill known as anchor text distribution.

Things to Look Out For

Markers can find themselves tripped up by exact-match anchors. While this type of anchor text is great for helping Google to understand exactly what a page is about, using them too many times can quickly become unnatural.

It’s for this reason that genuine editorial links rarely use exact-match anchors. As a result, journalists are far more likely to use anchors that either directly reference a brand name or add a natural phrase.

Content that’s stuffed with exact-match commercial anchors can stand out like a sore thumb and is more likely to appear engineered rather than earned by the referenced domains. To remedy this, it’s worth blending different types of anchors for a more natural appearance.

Finding the Right Blend

At Solvid, our link-building campaigns focus on anchor text as something that must be kept natural at all times, rather than something to optimise aggressively at the cost of the overall quality of the content.

This usually involves letting branded anchors be used sparingly while keeping the overall appearance of our copy natural, reserving exact matches for a handful of placements where they genuinely fit. We’re also mindful to never dictate anchor text in a way that causes it to have the appearance of an ad.

Here, the goal is for your anchor profile to become as organic as possible to keep the dangers of over-optimisation at bay.

While anchor text is a very powerful SEO tool, using it sparingly can provide the most effective results. With the help of a varied, brand-led anchor profile, it’s possible to build a stronger backlink profile that’s far more effective than a keyword-stuffed one.

If you take one thing away: anchor text matters, but restraint matters more. A varied, brand-led anchor profile is both safer and, in our experience, more effective than a keyword-stuffed one.