What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the visible, clickable wording that carries a hyperlink. Google reads it as a description of the destination page, and so do your readers, which is why a link saying ‘book a Gurugram property visit’ sets a far clearer expectation than one saying ‘click here’. Internal links, external links and backlinks all carry it. All three feed the same signal.
Hyperlink Anchor Text
How anchor text carries meaning
Google crawls a page, finds a link, and stores the wording as context for the target URL. Repeat that across a few hundred links and the search engine builds a picture of what the destination page covers, assembled largely from what other people choose to call it.
That is why anchor text works both ways. Your own internal links teach Google how your site is organised, so a hotel site in Delhi NCR that keeps pointing blog posts at its booking page with ‘banquet hall in Aerocity’ is reinforcing that phrase every single time, quietly and at no cost. External backlinks do the heavier lifting, because you did not write them, so the signal is harder to fake.
Screen readers announce links out of context too. Ten links all reading ‘read more’ are useless to someone browsing by audio.
Where teams slip up
Over-optimisation is the classic one. An e-commerce brand decides its money keyword is ‘buy handmade rugs online India’, then jams that phrase into every guest post, footer and directory listing it can reach, a pattern Google has been catching since 2012. The result is usually a flattening of rankings, not a lift.
The other extreme is just as common. Entire blogs where every link says ‘here’ or ‘this article’. You are throwing away context you already own, at zero cost.
Also check your image links, because when a linked image carries no alt attribute the alt text becomes the anchor, and an empty one hands Google nothing at all to work with.
What this looks like day to day
Take a boutique retail listing in Khan Market, where the internal anchors might run ‘retail space near Khan Market metro’, then ‘commercial leasing in central Delhi’, then ‘view floor plans’, each one varied, natural and describing something real. No two identical.
Pull your backlink anchors from Google Search Console under Links, group them by branded, exact-match, partial and generic, and if exact-match is dominating the profile then stop building those and let brand mentions catch up.
Related terms: Attribution Window · Average Order Value · Backlink.
Where this shows up in the work: SEO & AI Search · Full glossary.
Anchor Text — questions, answered.
Yes. It remains one of the clearer signals Google has about what a page covers, particularly for internal links where you control every word of the wording yourself. The weight given to exact-match commercial anchors from external sites has dropped a long way since the Penguin updates.
There is no published ratio, and anyone quoting one is guessing. Aim for anchors a real writer would produce: mostly branded and descriptive, occasional exact keyword, some generic. If the profile looks manufactured to you, it looks that way to Google too.
Last updated 2026-08-08
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