Anchor Text: The Foundation of Good SEO?

We’ve always known the importance of certain factors for SEO. 

Quality, helpful, authoritative content is the cornerstone of any organic search content marketing strategy. Backlinks are a key source for providing referral traffic and site authority.  Technical SEO is essential for allowing your site pages to be discovered and ranked highly.

Yet while Google’s Summer 2024 leak revealed that many of the assumptions SEOs had were correct—there were a couple of surprises. One of these surprises had to do with a small metric that may be laying the foundation for whether your domain is regularly showing up on the top of search engine results pages. 

Anchor text. 

Why is it such an important factor for SEO? Let’s dive in. 

What is Anchor Text in SEO?

In SEO, anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It often appears in a different color and is sometimes underlined. 

Anchor text provides context about the content of the link destination (or not…), helping both users and search engines understand the relevance and topic of the linked page. 

There are various types of anchor text. These include:

• Natural: These are the unobtrusive, descriptive anchor links that occur naturally over the course of a page, typically included atop existing copy.  

• Branded: These are brand names used as anchor text.

• Generic: These are non-descriptive anchor text that makes sense in the context of the page, like “Buy now,” “Learn more,” or “Contact us.”

• Naked: These are bare-bones URLs on the page.

There are a few other types, including Exact Match, Partial Match, and Image. But in general, it’s worth noting that Natural anchor text links are the most preferred for SEO purposes.

The Role of Anchor Text & Backlinks

Backlinks, or the links to your domain that exist on other websites, have long been a foundational metric Google uses to determine your “site authority.” Basically, Google determines that, if a lot of high-authority websites are linking to you, you must be posting valuable content that’s worth ranking highly on its search engine results pages.

With the 2024 ranking metrics leak, we’ve learned that Google, when evaluating backlinks, assesses anchor text and the context of the language surrounding the link. 

Why does this matter?

It shows that Google is trying to understand these links, and why other websites are seeking to link to your domain. Also, it’s a simple but effective way for Google to weed out spammy backlinks that are trying to exploit Google’s system.

While this may seem like a small revelation, it reveals that, for years, many organizations have been wasting time, effort, and money on poor SEO practices.

Anchor Text: Another Reason Why Backlink Packages Don’t Work 

If you own your business or work in Marketing, there’s a good chance you received a pitch from someone offering to sell you a “backlink package” to boost your SEO. If these have ever seemed a little suspicious to you—you were right!

There are multiple reasons why these backlink packages won’t work to boost your SEO—and can do more harm than good. 

One of these reasons is due to the fact that these backlinks will likely have unvaried backlink anchor text. When Google sees hundreds or thousands of links suddenly appear with unvaried anchor text that’s an enormous red flag that something’s not right. As a result, those links won’t help your domain, and you may end up with a significant penalty.

What if I use an anchor text generator?

Some might wonder if there’s a workaround. After all, couldn’t you use A.I. tools to provide varied anchor text for hundreds or even thousands of backlinks?

Sure, but it won’t help.

Keep in mind that anchor text alone isn’t going to make up for a bunch of poor, low-quality backlinks. Google still has workarounds, including tracking backlink authority, click-through rate, and bounce rate. 

There’s no point in trying to trick Google, or users, into coming to your site. The best method is the one we at Saltbox have always espoused:

Produce useful, informed, authoritative content that steadily builds a relationship with your readership to move them steadily down the marketing funnel. 

That’s good SEO.

What are Anchor Text Ratios? Should I be concerned about them?

Discussions on anchor text ratios center on evaluating many links on your pages are Natural, Branded, Generic, Exact Match, etc.

Run a Google search, and you’ll find a variety of strict guidelines about what percentage of Natural vs. Generic vs. Partial Match anchors you should have. Keep in mind Google has not released any data that demonstrates what the best anchor text ratios are. So, for the time being, simply prioritize your users' experience of your site. 

But since most readers (and Google!) prefer Natural, helpful anchor text that doesn’t appear hyper-optimized for SEO, that’s what should make up the majority of your on-page links. 

Anchor Text: Primary SEO Takeaways

• Create varied, helpful anchor text for all your internal links: Your main goal is to direct users to other helpful content on your site—so prioritize that first and foremost by placing your links on natural, relevant text with the goal of aiding interested readers.

• Keep in mind the text that surrounds your links: Since Google takes context into account when evaluating links, try to place your internal links in text blocks that are related to the topic the linked content discusses.  

• In a backlink acquisition strategy, try to get varied anchor text in your acquired links wherever possible. If you have a good relationship with the reporter or publishing partner, it may be worth requesting that the link’s anchor text accurately describes your content. But if it can’t be done—that’s fine. A high-quality backlink is still valuable.

Interested in learning more about Saltbox’s SEO solutions? Contact our team today.