Anchor Text: Types, Google's Rules and the Leak

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link: the words a reader clicks to go somewhere else. It matters for SEO because it describes the destination page to both readers and search engines. Google’s own documentation says anchor text “tells users and Google something about the page you’re linking to,” and the leaked Google API documentation shows that the anchor words and the text around them are stored for each link.

This guide is for site owners, writers and marketers who add links or buy them. It covers the types of anchors, what Google’s link guidelines actually ask for, how internal and external anchors differ, where optimization turns into link spam, and which anchor attributes appear in the 2024 Google leak, framed honestly: stored, not known to be weighted.

On this page

• What is anchor text?
• The types of anchor text
• What Google’s link guidelines ask for
• Internal versus external anchors
• When do anchors become over-optimization?
• What the Google leak stores about anchors
• How do you audit your anchor text?
• Getting anchor text right on your site

What is anchor text?

The anchor is the clickable text inside a link, written in HTML between the opening <a href="..."> tag and the closing </a> tag. In <a href="/blog/internal-linking/">internal linking guide</a>, the linked phrase is “internal linking guide.” For an image used as a link, there is no visible text, so Google’s link best practices say it uses the image’s alt attribute as the link text instead.

The anchor is only part of what a link communicates. Google’s guidance says the words before and after a link matter too, and advises reading the sentence as a whole. The diagram below shows the parts of a link as a reader, and a crawler, meets them.

The types of anchor text

Anchors are usually sorted into six or seven types, depending on how closely the words match the destination’s main topic. The labels are industry shorthand, not Google terms, but they are useful for describing a link profile.

The pattern that matters is the mix, not any single link. Descriptive wording is not rare: in the 2024 Web Almanac, 84% of desktop and 91% of mobile home pages passed its descriptive link text check, so generic “click here” links are now the exception. Links other people choose to give you arrive with every type: your brand name, your URL, a description of what you do, occasionally your main keyword. A profile where most external anchors are the same commercial keyword did not happen by accident.

What Google’s link guidelines ask for

Google’s link best practices are specific about link text, and they describe good writing more than SEO tricks:

• Be descriptive. Generic anchors such as “click here,” “read more” or “website” lack specificity. A descriptive anchor gives context about the linked page.
• Be concise. Anchors that cram in unnecessary detail reduce clarity; focus on the key information about the destination.
• Write naturally. Google asks you to resist the urge to cram every keyword related to the page you are linking to, and notes that keyword stuffing in anchors violates its spam policies.
• Mind the context. The words before and after a link matter, and links chained next to each other are harder to tell apart and lose their surrounding text.
• Describe images. For image links, the alt text is the anchor, so write it.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide repeats the core point: the clickable words tell users and Google something about the page you are linking to. A useful test from the link guide itself: would a reader need these words to understand where the link goes? If not, they are there for a search engine, and that is the warning sign.

Internal versus external anchors

Internal anchors are fully under your control and should be clear and consistent; external anchors are chosen by other people and should look like it. That difference changes the rules.

Internal links are navigation. You can and should use descriptive anchors that name the destination’s topic, and it is normal for several internal links to a service page to use similar wording. The limits are readability and honesty: no stuffing, no sitewide footer blocks of keyword links. Our internal linking guide covers where internal links should go.

External links to your site are votes you do not control. When they are earned, anchors vary widely. When you have influence, such as a partner page, a directory listing or a guest article, the temptation is to ask for your keyword. Resist it. Ask for your brand name or a plain description, and let the surrounding sentence carry the topic. What are backlinks covers how external links work more broadly.

Outbound links from your site are anchors you write about other people’s pages. Describe them accurately, and qualify paid or user-generated links with the right rel value, covered in nofollow links. The same Almanac found nofollow on 32.7% of pages but sponsored on just 0.4%, so the older value is still the one most sites reach for.

When do anchors become over-optimization?

Anchors become a problem when links with keyword-rich wording are placed to manipulate rankings rather than to help readers. Google’s spam policies are explicit. Their list of link spam includes “links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites,” keyword-rich or hidden links embedded in widgets distributed across sites, and widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites. The spectrum below shows where common anchor practices sit.

The practical rule: if you paid for the link, or wrote the article it sits in, do not choose a keyword anchor, and qualify the link with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" if money or goods changed hands. The same policy says such links are not a violation when they are qualified. For honest ways to earn links, see link building strategies.

What the Google leak stores about anchors

The May 2024 leak of Google’s Content Warehouse API documentation, more than 2,500 pages of it, shows that Google stores detailed data about every anchor, but it does not show how any of it is weighted. SparkToro’s report on the leak states that the documentation does not show the weight of elements or prove which are used in ranking, and iPullRank’s analysis makes the same caveat. Every attribute below is stored, not known to be weighted.

What each group suggests, with the caveat that each is Google storing an attribute, not a known ranking weight:

• AnchorsAnchor has 33 documented fields. Beyond text, it stores context2 (a hash of terms near the anchor) and fullLeftContext and fullRightContext. That matches Google’s public advice that the words around a link matter.
• AnchorsAnchor.sourceType records the quality of the anchor’s source page and is described as correlated with the source page’s index tier. A link’s value plausibly depends on where it comes from, not just what it says.
• IndexingDocjoinerAnchorPhraseSpamInfo holds phraseAnchorSpamCount (“how many spam phrases found in the anchors among unique domains”), phraseAnchorSpamDays (“over how many days 80% of these phrases were discovered”), phraseAnchorSpamRate and phraseAnchorSpamFraq. Together they describe spikes of spammy anchor phrases, which is exactly what a bought link campaign produces.
• CompressedQualitySignals.anchorMismatchDemotion suggests Google tracks anchors that do not match the target page. iPullRank’s analysis reads it as links being demoted when they do not match the site they point to.

For more on the documents themselves, see our Google leak explainer.

How do you audit your anchor text?

Audit anchors in two places: the external anchors pointing at you, and the internal anchors you control. Both take under an hour for a small site.

1. External anchors. Search Console’s Links report includes a “Top linking text” table, a sample of the words other sites use when they link to you. Look for a healthy mix of brand, URL and descriptive anchors. A list dominated by one commercial phrase is worth investigating, especially if it traces back to paid placements.
2. Internal anchors. Crawl the site and export all internal links with their link text. Filter for generic anchors (“click here,” “read more,” “learn more”), empty anchors from image links without alt text, and important pages whose inbound internal anchors never mention their topic.
3. Fix in order. Rewrite generic internal anchors on your most visited pages first, add alt text to linked images, then ask partners who used an exact-match keyword for your brand name instead where it is easy to do so.

This check is part of a wider link review in how to do an SEO audit.

Getting anchor text right on your site

Getting anchors right is mostly a writing habit: describe the page you are linking to, in the words a reader needs, inside a sentence that gives it context. Internally, be clear and consistent. Externally, let other people choose their words and never pay for a keyword anchor. The Google documents, public and leaked, point the same way: the anchor, its context and the quality of the linking page all matter, and patterns that look manufactured are exactly what Google stores data to spot.

The same habits help with AI search, where engines lift passages rather than links: a sentence that names what it links to is a sentence that makes sense when quoted alone. If you want your internal anchors, external anchor profile and link qualification checked as part of a full review, that is included in our AI visibility audit. For the off-site side, digital PR for AI search covers earning mentions that bring natural anchors with them.