Anchor text is the visible text of a link, sometimes called link text. Google’s description of its job is short: it tells people and Google something about the page being linked to. It matters in off-page SEO, the signals coming from other websites, and equally in the links on your own pages.
In plain English
The labels on doors along a corridor.
“Door 3” is accurate and useless. “Accounts” tells you whether to open it. The door is identical either way. The label is doing all the work.
What it actually does
Google publishes a test worth stealing: read the anchor text on its own, out of context, and see whether it’s specific enough to make sense by itself. If you can’t tell what the page could be about, it needs to be more descriptive.
It names the usual offenders directly: “page”, “article”, and “click here”. It also warns against the opposite, wrapping a whole long sentence in a link, and against chaining several links next to each other, because readers can’t distinguish them and each one loses the surrounding words that gave it meaning.
Pasting the address itself counts as generic too. Google says not to use a URL as the link text, and to use the page’s title or a description of it instead. A naked address is the one weak anchor people don’t recognize as weak, because it looks deliberate rather than lazy.
For images used as links, Google uses the image’s alt attribute, its written description, as the anchor text. An image link with empty alt text is an unlabeled door.
On keywords, Google’s advice is to write naturally and resist the urge to cram in every related term. Its own check: does the reader need those words to understand the next page? If it feels forced, it is.
An exact-match anchor is one that reproduces the target phrase precisely. Used occasionally on your own internal links, meaning links between pages on your site, that’s normal. Arriving repeatedly from other sites, it’s the pattern Google names when describing optimized anchor text in guest posts and press releases.
What this looks like in practice
A service page has 40 links pointing to it from other sites. Thirty-eight use the same six-word commercial phrase.
No editorial process produces that. Forty different writers, given a free choice, produce forty roughly different descriptions, including the company name, the page title, and a few that say “here”. Uniformity is the tell.
What people usually get wrong
“Click here is fine, people know what to do.” They do. The link stops describing anything, which is the part that was useful.
“Use exact-match anchors wherever possible.” On inbound links this is the single most visible sign of a link campaign.
“Anchor text only matters for links from other sites.” It describes destinations either way, and on your own site you control all of it.
“Pasting the full address is neutral.” Google asks you not to. It describes nothing, and on a phone it wraps across three lines.
What you can do about it
Search your site for “click here” and “read more” and replace them with the destination’s subject.
Search for pasted addresses as well, and replace them with the page’s title.
Read your anchors aloud with the surrounding sentence removed. If you can’t tell where you’d land, rewrite.
Add alt text to images used as links.
When someone offers you a link, don’t specify the anchor text. Asking for a particular phrase is what turns an editorial mention into something else.
Words you will hear
Anchor text. The visible, clickable text of a link. Also called link text.
Exact-match anchor. Anchor text reproducing the target phrase precisely.
Naked URL. A web address pasted in as the link text instead of a description.
Link text. The same thing as anchor text.
For backlink, nofollow and link profile, see What is off-page SEO? For orphan page, breadcrumb and contextual link, see Internal linking and site structure.
