Anchor Text Best Practices: What Google Actually Says

Anchor text best practices are pretty simple. Google wants link text that’s descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both the page it sits on and the page it points to. And it has to be written for people, not stuffed with keywords. Below: how Google finds and reads links, how to write a decent anchor, what to do with internal links, and where “optimized” quietly turns into link spam.

What Is Anchor Text and How Does Google Read It?

Anchor text (you’ll also hear “link text”) is the visible, clickable part of a link. It tells people and Google what’s on the other end. But Google can’t read an anchor it never crawled. According to Google’s guide to crawlable links, its crawlers generally follow only <a> elements with an href attribute. Links fired by script events, or <a> tags with no href? Not reliably extracted. So that fancy JS “link” your dev built might as well not exist.

There are fallbacks, though. If an <a> element is empty, Google can use the title attribute as the anchor text. For image links it takes the image’s alt attribute. Anchors injected by JavaScript? Open the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console and check that the text actually shows up in the rendered HTML. Takes a minute, and it saves you from guessing.

Anchor Text Best Practices Google Spells Out

A good anchor is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it lives on and the page it links to. It gives the link context. It tells readers what they’ll get before they click. Here’s what that means day to day:

• Describe the destination, not the act of clicking.
• Keep it short: a few words that name the topic.
• Fit the surrounding sentence so it reads naturally.
• Set the reader’s expectation about the next page.
• Avoid generic phrases such as “click here”, “this page” or “learn more”.

Google gives you a handy gut check: does the reader need these keywords to understand the next page? If you catch yourself forcing terms into the link, you’ve gone too far. Simple as that. Put “check it out here” next to “guide to hosting a domain migration”. Only one of them tells the reader (and the crawler) what’s waiting on the other side.

Is Exact Match Anchor Text a Problem?

No, not when it’s simply the natural way to describe the page. Cramming keywords into anchors is a different story. That’s keyword stuffing, and Google treats it as a violation of its spam policies. An exact match anchor repeats the target keyword word for word. A descriptive anchor explains the page in whatever words suit the sentence. Sometimes the two come out identical. Fine. Nobody’s getting penalized for that.

Looking for the ideal anchor ratio in Google’s documentation? You won’t find one, because Google doesn’t publish any. Tools that promise a “safe” percentage of exact match links are guessing, full stop. The real test is readability. One more thing: old domains drag their past links along with them, so look at the anchor history of old domains before you build anything on one.

How to Write Internal Link Anchors That Help Navigation

Internal anchors help people and Google figure out your site structure and find pages. Every page you care about should get at least one contextual link from somewhere else on the site. Think signposts, not ranking levers. The routine I’d recommend is boring, and it works:

1. Pick the pages that help a reader understand the current one.
2. Link to them in context, inside a relevant sentence.
3. Describe the target page in the anchor itself.
4. Vary the wording naturally across different pages.
5. Make sure no important page is orphaned, with zero internal links pointing to it.

Want the bigger picture on how links build authority? Browse our backlink profile articles.

When Do Anchors Become Over-Optimized Link Spam?

Anchors become link spam when optimized anchor text shows up in paid articles, advertorials, guest posts or press releases spread across other sites to pass ranking credit. Google’s spam policies for Search show this with a short passage about weddings, where “wedding rings”, “best ring”, “flowers” and “wedding dress” each get turned into a link. The text exists purely to host keyword anchors. Does anyone reading it learn anything? Nope.

If you run a network, be extra careful here. Google explicitly lists keyword-rich anchors in links between your own sites, placed to pass value, as link spam. And those links tend to get exposed by shared technical signals, so it pays to know the footprints that connect sites.

Put everything on one server and the connections get even easier to spot (we go into that in our piece on the risks of single-host networks).

Sites in a network can sit behind a reverse proxy on separate EU or USA IP addresses, and Jalvo provides proxy IPs for site networks for exactly that setup. But separate infrastructure doesn’t make manipulative anchors okay. Links still need a reason to exist for readers.

A Quick Anchor Text Checklist Before You Publish

Before you hit publish, check every link for crawlability, clarity and natural wording. Quick run-through:

• The link is a real <a href> element.
• The anchor is a few descriptive words about the target.
• No generic phrases like “click here”.
• Linked images carry descriptive alt text.
• The anchor shows up in the rendered HTML.
• No keyword-rich anchors between your own sites.

Honestly, all anchor text best practices boil down to one habit. Write for the reader, describe the destination honestly, and let Google work out relevance from there.

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