What Is Anchor Text? The Clickable Words That Carry a Link's Meaning
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link: the words a reader sees and clicks, as opposed to the URL in the link’s href attribute. It carries the link’s meaning because it tells the reader what to expect before the click and gives Google context about the page on the other side. Google’s link best practices put it this way: “The better your anchor text, the easier it is for people to navigate your site and for Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.”
What Google Counts as Anchor Text
- The text between the
<a>tags. A link with no text gives no description. - The
titleattribute, as a fallback when the<a>element is empty. - For images used as links, the image’s alt text: “Google uses the alt attribute of the img element as anchor text.” An image link without alt text is a link without a description.
What Good Anchor Text Looks Like
Google’s definition is short: “Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to.” Its documentation marks “Click here” as “too generic,” along with links reading “Read more” and “website.”
Two tests from the same page:
- Read the anchor text on its own. Google’s tip: “Try reading only the anchor text (out of context) and check if it’s specific enough to make sense by itself.”
- Read the sentence around it. Google’s reminder: “the words before and after links matter, so pay attention to the sentence as a whole.”
Google also advises against placing several links side by side, because readers cannot tell them apart and each link loses its surrounding text.
| Weak anchor | Better anchor |
|---|---|
| Click here to see our pricing | See our pricing for monthly plans |
| Read more | How to pickle ghost peppers |
| Our website | The cheese shop's opening hours |
| best cheap running shoes buy running shoes online | Trail running shoes for wide feet |
The last row shows the opposite failure. Google asks writers to “resist the urge to cram every keyword that’s related to the page that you’re linking to,” and reminds them that “keyword stuffing is a violation of our spam policies.”
Types of Anchor Text
| Type | Example | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Descriptive | guide to auditing technical SEO issues | Internal and editorial links |
| Exact-match | technical SEO audit | Natural when it is the page's plain name; a warning sign when repeated across many inbound links |
| Branded | Search Console | References to a named product, company, or publication |
| Generic | read more | Says nothing about the destination |
| Bare URL | <!–INLINECODE4–> | Citations and plain-text references |
| Image | The alt text of a linked image | Linked logos, banners, and thumbnails |
There is no mix of types to aim for. Each anchor should describe the page it points to, and a profile built that way varies by itself.
Anchor Text and Link Spam
Anchor text becomes a policy question when links are bought or arranged. Google’s spam policies count as link spam “links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites,” and illustrate it with a paid article whose links sit on commercial phrases such as “wedding rings” and “best ring.” The pattern is not one exact-match link; it is commercial anchors placed for ranking credit, concentrated across links the site arranged.
Internal Links Versus Inbound Links
- Internal links are yours to write. Apply the descriptive, concise, relevant standard every time, and use the anchor to say what the destination page covers. Google notes that careful anchor text on internal links helps both people and Google understand a site.
- Inbound links are written by other sites. You can influence them by making the page’s subject clear, and suggesting a plain, descriptive anchor when someone asks how to link to you is ordinary. What the spam policies describe is a specific commercial phrase made a condition of a paid or arranged link.
Anchor Text Review
- Read the anchors of your most important internal links out of context. Each should make sense alone.
- Check that every image that is the only content of a link has descriptive alt text. Where the same link also has visible text, the image can take empty alt text, as the W3C’s functional images tutorial shows, so the link name is not read twice.
- Replace “click here,” “read more,” and similar anchors on links that matter.
- In your inbound link report, look for one commercial phrase repeated across many referring sites, especially paid or low-relevance ones.
- When you contribute content elsewhere, let the link use your brand or a plain description of the page.