Anchor Text Strategy: Types, Ratios and Mistakes
Which anchors to use, roughly how many of each, and the slip-ups that make a paid link pretty much worthless.
The words you link with still matter. Just not the way the old SEO forums used to swear by.
Put the anchor text ratio question to a room full of SEOs and you'll walk out with a different number from every one of them, each stated like it's gospel. Google has never published one.
What it has published is a fairly clear idea of what good anchor text looks like, plus a list of the ways people abuse it. A sensible approach sits somewhere between the two, and that's what this guide is about. We'll go through the different anchor types, the spread we actually start campaigns with, the mistakes that come up again and again, and how things change in competitive niches like gambling and finance.
What anchor text actually is
Anchor text is just the words you click on. In the sentence "we compared the best road bikes under £1,000", if those last six words are the link, they're the anchor.
Google uses those words to get a feel for the page you land on. Its own guidance on link best practices asks for anchors that describe the page, don't drag on, and make sense on both sites. There's also a line in there we're quite fond of, roughly: if you're shoehorning keywords in, you've overdone it.
That second bit is where it gets interesting. They do still make a difference, and that's the whole reason people get greedy with them. Google's Penguin update in 2012 went after sites whose links nearly all said the same money keyword, and anyone working in SEO back then remembers how many dropped overnight. Nobody links like that by accident, so it stands out a mile. Now, more often than not, Google just discounts dodgy links instead of penalising the site. That sounds kinder until you remember you still paid for them.
The main types of anchor text
You'll see six kinds of anchor over and over. Say there's a bike shop called Spokehouse (we made it up) trying to get its road bikes under £1,000 page ranking. Here's what each kind would look like for them.
Type | Example | Use it |
|---|---|---|
Branded | Spokehouse | Nearly always. It's how most people link to a business without thinking about it. |
Naked URL | spokehouse.co.uk | Citations, resource lists, anywhere the link is mentioned rather than woven into a sentence. |
Generic | this guide, here, read more | Now and then. Google isn't a fan, but real writers use them constantly. |
Partial match | a guide to cheaper road bikes | The bulk of your descriptive links. Relevant without copying the keyword word for word. |
Exact match | road bikes under £1,000 | Occasionally, on your strongest and most relevant placements. |
Branded plus keyword | Spokehouse's road bike guide | A handy middle ground when you want relevance without much risk. |
There are a couple of others you'll bump into. Image links use the image's alt text as the anchor, so it's worth writing that properly. And page title anchors are just the headline of the article being linked to. We count those as partial match in practice, because that's usually what they are.
Anchor text ratios: the spread we start with
Honest answer first. There's no correct ratio, and anyone selling you one is guessing. What looks natural depends on your niche, how established the site is and how the pages already ranking got there.
You do have to start somewhere, though. This is the rough spread we use for a new campaign, and it's the same one you'll find in our guide to buying backlinks without getting burned.
Anchor type | Rough share of links to a page |
|---|---|
Branded | 30–40% |
Naked URL | 10–20% |
Generic | 10–15% |
Partial match | 15–25% |
Exact match | Under 5–10% |
Then we adjust it. Pull the backlinks for the three or four pages ranking where you want to be and look at how they're anchored. If they're mostly branded, which happens more than you'd think, keep your exact match lower than the table suggests. If the whole first page is full of keyword-heavy anchors you've got a bit more room, but don't read that as permission to go wild.
Two things people tend to forget. The ratio is per page, not per domain, so ten exact-match links spread over ten pages tells a very different story from ten pointing at one. And your existing profile counts. If a page already picked up a pile of exact-match links years ago, the next batch should lean branded.
There's a good sense check in our post about building a link plan that survives a core update. Read your anchors as a plain list and ask whether a bunch of unconnected writers could plausibly have come up with it.
Choosing anchors by link type
How you pick an anchor depends a lot on how the link is being made.
With a guest post you write the sentence, so the anchor can be absolutely anything. That freedom is the risk. It's very easy to write a sentence whose only job is to carry a keyword, and editors can usually tell (so can Google). Write the paragraph properly first, then look for the place a link would naturally sit.
With a niche edit the sentence already exists, so the anchor has to fit what's there. People treat that as a limitation, but it usually nudges you towards something that reads naturally. We go into the differences in more detail in our comparison of guest posts and niche edits, including which works better for which page.
Digital PR is different again. You don't get to choose the anchor at all, and most coverage links with your brand name or the homepage URL. That's no bad thing. Those links are often what makes a little exact match elsewhere look normal, and our guide to link building vs digital PR covers how the two fit together.
Whatever you're buying, decide the anchor before you place the order rather than after. A decent brief makes this easy, and our piece on briefing content that ranks and still reads well covers what to put in one.
Anchors in competitive and restricted niches
Some niches make all of this harder. Gambling, crypto, finance, CBD and anything else where one page can earn serious money tend to attract the most aggressive anchor text, simply because the reward for ranking is so high.
The rules don't change, but the margin for error gets smaller. Keep money anchors like "best betting sites" or "crypto exchange" for your strongest, most relevant placements, and lean harder on branded and partial match everywhere else. A keyword anchor on an off-topic site is pretty much what Google's spam policies have in mind when they mention optimised anchors in guest posts.
Two other things are worth knowing. Brand names often do some of the work for you, so on a review or comparison page an anchor like "our Coinbase review" is partial match for a valuable search and reads perfectly naturally. And publishers in these niches often set their own rules, such as a sponsored tag or branded anchors only, so check before you plan your mix. Our page on gambling link building covers what to look for in that space, and the guide to restricted niche backlinks covers the rest.
Common anchor text mistakes
Most of the problems we come across boil down to a handful of habits.
The big one is using the same exact-match anchor on every order. Five orders, five different sites, five links all saying "cheap road bikes". Each might look fine on its own, but together they're a fingerprint.
Then there's forgetting about the page the link lands on. An anchor about road bikes pointing at your homepage, or your brand name pointing at a deep category page, muddies things. The anchor should describe the page it goes to.
Writing the sentence around the keyword is another. "For the best cheap road bikes UK, visit this site" doesn't read like anyone wrote it for a person. Decent editors will reject it, and when they don't, readers notice.
A lot of people also neglect their internal links. You control every anchor on your own site, and it's the safest place to use descriptive, keyword-led anchors. It's strange how often a site spends hundreds on external links and then links between its own pages with "click here".
Last, never checking what's already there. Run your current anchors through Ahrefs or Semrush before you plan new ones. Old directory links, scraper sites and a previous agency's work can leave you heavier on exact match than you realise, without you having built a single link on purpose.
Planning anchors across a campaign
The easiest fix for nearly all of this is to plan anchors up front, instead of making them up one order at a time.
Start with the pages you want to rank. For each one, jot down five or six anchors across the different types: your brand, a couple of partial matches, the naked URL, maybe one exact match kept back for your strongest placement. Then hand them out as you order and tick them off as they go live.
Keep a running list per page so you can see the mix at a glance. Our free link building planner is a decent place to sketch it out, and because every order sits in your Press Parrot dashboard, checking what's already gone out doesn't mean digging through old emails.
If you look after several clients, this matters even more. Anchors drift when nobody owns the list, which is one of the failures we wrote about in running link building across a dozen clients, and it's a big part of why we built the agency side of Press Parrot the way we did.
When you're ready to put the plan to work, you can browse real sites, metrics and prices in the Press Parrot marketplace with a free account. There's no subscription, and you only pay for what you order.