What is anchor text?
In the HTML of a link, the anchor text is the part between the opening and closing tags, the words that appear underlined or colored on the page. "Read our case study" is anchor text. So is "click here," and so is a bare URL. Search engines have used it since the earliest days as a description of the destination written by someone other than the destination's owner, which makes it one of the more honest signals on the web. If a hundred sites link to a page with the words "holiday window films," Google has a fair idea what that page is about.
Anchor text comes in flavors: exact match (the target keyword word for word), partial match, branded (the company name), generic ("learn more") and naked (the URL itself). A healthy page collects a mix.
Why it matters
Why anchor text matters
Internally, anchor text is how you tell search engines, and people, what your own pages are for. A site that links to its film page with "click here" has said nothing; a site that links to it with "brand film production" has described the page in the words someone might search for. Across hundreds of internal links, that adds up to a map of the site that a crawler can read.
Externally it is a trust signal and a risk. Links from other sites with descriptive anchors are valuable; links with the same exact-match anchor repeated unnaturally are a known footprint of paid link schemes, and Google's Penguin updates were built to catch them.
In practice
How anchor text works in practice
- 01
Write links as descriptions. When you link to a page, use the words that say what the reader will find there, naturally, inside the sentence. Vary them across the site rather than pasting the same phrase every time. Keep anchors short enough to scan and specific enough to mean something, and never make a link out of "here" or "this."
- 02
Review what points at you. Backlink tools show the anchor text profile of a domain, and the shape of it tells a story: mostly branded and natural is healthy; mostly exact-match commercial phrases suggests a past link-buying campaign that may need cleaning up. For internal links, a crawl report lists every anchor pointing to each page, which is a fast way to find pages the site has never properly described.
At RIOT
Anchor text at RIOT
Every entry in this glossary ends with its related terms, linked with the name of the term as the anchor. It is deliberate: a crawler following those links learns what each page is called in the words a person would use, and a reader knows exactly where the link goes before clicking. It is a small discipline that makes a thousand pages legible.
Watch out
What people get wrong about anchor text
Over-optimizing it. Linking to the same page with the same exact keyword dozens of times, internally or by arrangement with other sites, is a pattern Google recognizes and discounts, or penalizes. The opposite mistake is just as common: a site full of "learn more" and "read more" links that tell a crawler nothing, usually because the links were designed as buttons and nobody thought about the words.
