Anchor Text Ratios That Don’t Get You Filtered

Anchor text optimization is picking the clickable words in your links so they describe the page honestly. No stuffing. For backlinks, that mostly means exact-match anchors stay rare, and your brand name does the heavy lifting. Is there an official safe ratio? Nope. But there’s a solid way to set yours.

I’ve cleaned up a fair few link profiles where the anchors gave the game away in about ten seconds. Same money keyword. Link after link after link. So forget the magic numbers. Here’s what each anchor type is, where the risk sits, and how I’d actually set ratios.

What Is Anchor Text in SEO?

It’s the visible, clickable bit of a link. That’s it. Google’s own link best practices say it tells people and Google something about the page on the other end. Linking an image instead of text? Then Google reads the image’s alt text as the anchor.

Google’s advice on writing it fits on a napkin. Descriptive. Reasonably short. Relevant to both pages. And my favourite line in the whole doc: if it feels like you’re forcing keywords in, it’s probably too much. Worth remembering for every link you place or ask for.

Types of Anchor Text, With Examples

Picture a coffee roaster called Northwind trying to rank a page about single-origin beans. Same link, very different anchors. Here’s what each type looks like, and where it tends to pop up when nobody’s engineering anything:

Spot the pattern in that last column? Left alone, people link with names, URLs, and loose phrases. Exact match is the oddball. So a profile stuffed with it sticks out a mile. 

Curious about link types more broadly? Our guide to the types of backlinks goes deeper.

Why Anchor Text Can Get You in Trouble

Google doesn’t mince words here. Its link spam policy names links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases on other sites as link spam. There’s even an example paragraph where wedding rings, best ring, and buy flowers are all linked. Painful to read. Deliberately.

One keyword-rich link? Fine. Nobody cares. Fifty guest posts with the same money phrase is another story, and it looks exactly like what it is. Worst case, you’re staring at an unnatural links manual action. More often, those links just get discounted and quietly stop helping.

So the danger isn’t anchor text itself. Descriptive anchors genuinely help Google understand a page. The danger is repetition you built on purpose. Real profiles are messy, a bit random. Engineered ones are neat. And neat is what gets noticed.

There’s No Official Safe Ratio

You’ll see plenty of posts quoting tidy splits. Sixty percent branded, ten percent exact, that sort of thing. Ever wondered where those come from? Mostly thin air. Google has never published an anchor ratio. And what looks natural in one niche can look strange in the next.

Think about it. A local plumber’s links lean hard on the business name. A SaaS tool collects product names and feature phrases. A recipe blog gets buried in naked URLs from forums and Pinterest. Same rules, wildly different profiles. Copying someone else’s percentages misses all of that.

How to Set Your Ratios From the Pages That Rank

This is the anchor text optimization method I actually trust. Don’t copy a blog post’s numbers. Copy the shape of whatever already ranks for your keyword. Twenty minutes with any backlink tool, and you get ratios that fit your niche instead of someone else’s.

Grab the top five organic results for your keyword. Skip Wikipedia and the other giants. Export each ranking page’s anchor report. Then sort every anchor into the types above: branded, naked, generic, exact, partial. By hand? Yep. Quicker than it sounds, honestly.

Now take the median share of each type across those five pages. That’s your benchmark. Here’s roughly how it might look, using made-up illustrative numbers rather than a real dataset, just so you can see the shape of it:

Then check your own page. Exact match at three times the median? Now you know which way to steer. Drop both sets of counts into the calculator, and the gap jumps out. Pair it with a backlink gap analysis, and you’ll also see which sites handed competitors those anchors.

Internal Links Play by Different Rules

Inside your own site? Relax a bit. Descriptive, keyword-rich internal anchors are completely normal, because you’re telling readers what your own pages cover. Google’s link guidance pretty much encourages it. Just keep them readable, and please don’t link every other phrase.

Backlinks are a different animal. You’re not meant to be steering them. So when the same commercial phrase shows up on dozens of other people’s sites, that’s the tell. Relaxed inside, careful outside. Honestly, that’s most of anchor text optimization in two lines.

Choosing Anchors for Links You Do Control

Some links you shape directly. Guest posts. A link insertion into an existing article. PR you pitched yourself. For those, this is roughly how I’d choose the words, placement by placement, without overthinking it:

• ➜ Start with your brand name, or whatever natural phrase fits the sentence.
• ➜ Partial match is fine when the sentence around it genuinely describes your page.
• ➜ Exact match? Occasionally, where it reads naturally. Never planned in bulk.
• ➜ Mix up the wording. Ten different phrasings beat ten copies of one.
• ➜ Read it out loud. Sounds forced? Change it.

Fixing a Profile That’s Already Over-Optimised

First, breathe. Run your numbers through the calculator and line them up against the ranking pages. Way off? Start diluting. New links with branded and natural anchors slowly shift the balance, and they’re the links you’d want anyway.

Placed some of those links yourself? Ask the site to switch the anchor to your brand name. Most will, if you ask nicely. And add new links at a steady link velocity, not a sudden burst. Bursts bring their own headaches.

Disavowing only makes sense if you’ve got a manual action or an obvious pile of spam links with money anchors. Most weird anchors from junk sites are ignored already. Before you cut anything, our piece on toxic backlinks explains how to tell the two apart.

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