Anchor text: what you control, what you do not, and what to do about it

Search engines read the words of a link as a description of the page it points to. So does a person scanning a paragraph, and so does a screen reader announcing links out of context.

That gives an anchor three jobs: tell the reader where they are going, tell the engine what the target page is about, and be intelligible on its own. All three are satisfied by the same fix, which is to write what the page is.

Every link inside your site is yours to word. This is where the real gains are, and almost nobody does it deliberately.

• Write the anchor as the subject of the destination page, in the sentence's own grammar.
• Vary it naturally across pages. Ten links to one page do not need identical wording, and identical wording is not a target to hit.
• Keep it short enough to scan: a few words, not a clause.
• Never link a whole sentence. The underline becomes noise and the anchor says nothing specific.
• Do not link the same phrase to two different pages on the same site. That is a cannibalisation signal you created yourself.

Two anchors deserve their own rule. The logo linking to the home page should carry the site name as its alt text, because that image is a link and an empty alt makes it a link with no words. And navigation items should say the section, not a category label invented for the menu: guides, free tools and pricing, rather than resources, solutions and plans.

When another site links to you, the writer chooses the words. That is correct, and you should not try to change it.

Google's link spam policy names large-scale article campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text. The pattern it describes is a site whose inbound anchors are dominated by the exact commercial phrase it wants to rank for, because someone wrote the anchor into every placement. A natural profile looks nothing like that: it is mostly your brand name, your domain, the title of the page, and phrases like this tool and their guide.

• Expect most inbound anchors to be your product name. That is what people call you.
• Expect naked URLs, page titles and vague phrases. All normal.
• Expect a few to be wrong or unflattering. Also normal, and not worth an email.

When you write to someone about a link, name the page and let them write the sentence. Sending a preferred anchor reads as an attempt to use their page, and editors notice.

Good: "The checker is at pingfox.com/tools/status-page-checker if it
fits that section."

Bad: "Please link with the anchor text: free status page monitoring
tool for developers."

The only case where naming words is fair is a correction: if a page calls your product by the wrong name, giving the right name is a fact, not an anchor request.

Tools show a pie chart of your anchors by type and articles recommend target percentages for each. No such percentages exist in any Google documentation, and you cannot control the inputs anyway.

• There is no published ratio of branded to exact-match anchors to aim for.
• You cannot move the ratio without asking people to write specific words, which is the pattern to avoid.
• The chart is still useful as a symptom: if your inbound anchors are mostly a commercial phrase you never use yourself, someone has been buying links in your name.
• The fix in that case is to stop paying whoever is doing it, not to chase a ratio.

Spend the attention on internal anchors, where the percentages are entirely yours and the improvement is immediate.

1. 1

   Crawl your own site

   Any crawler will export every internal link with its anchor text. So will an internal link checker.

2. 2

   Sort by anchor

   Count how many links use here, this, read more, learn more, click here. That number is your backlog.

3. 3

   Fix the templates first

   Most vague anchors come from a component: a card, a related-posts block, a call to action. Changing one template fixes hundreds of links.

4. 4

   Then fix the body links

   Work through the pages with the most traffic first. In each, make every link say what it points at.

5. 5

   Check for collisions

   Look for one phrase linking to two different pages. Decide which page owns the phrase, and repoint the rest.

This is an afternoon on a small site, it never needs redoing for pages you have already fixed, and it improves the site for readers and screen readers at the same time as for crawlers.