Anchor Text for SEO: The Mistakes That Hurt and the Ones That Do Not

Somebody once sent me an anchor text plan as a spreadsheet. Forty percent branded, twenty percent naked URL, five percent exact match, the rest split into categories I had to look up. It had colour coding. It also had nothing to do with how Google treats links.

I am Armen, an SEO consultant in Barcelona, and I run the agency ACERO Digital with a team of specialists. I still see that spreadsheet, or its cousins, in almost every link building proposal a client forwards to me for a second opinion.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Anchor text matters, but mostly in the places those plans ignore. You control very little of the anchor text on other people’s sites, and you control every word of the anchor text on your own. This post is about the mistakes that actually cost rankings, and the ones you can stop worrying about.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. Google reads it as a short label for the page on the other end, so the words in the link tell both the reader and the crawler what they will find before they get there.

In HTML it is simply the text between the opening and closing <a> tags. When the link is an image instead of words, Google uses the image’s alt attribute as the anchor text.

Google’s own guidance is short. Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it points to. Its documentation also tells you to write naturally and resist cramming keywords into links, which is advice almost everyone quotes and few people follow.

What types of anchor text are there?

SEO tools sort anchors into a handful of types. The labels are useful for reading a backlink report, not for planning one.

Look at the right hand column. It tells you more than the left. The type of anchor mostly reflects who placed the link and why, which is exactly what Google is trying to work out.

Does anchor text still affect rankings?

Yes, but far less than it did, and the weight has shifted from external links to context. In the early 2000s, enough links saying “cheap flights” could rank a page for cheap flights almost regardless of what was on it. That loophole is why the Penguin update arrived in April 2012 and hit sites with manipulated anchor profiles hard.

Since Penguin was folded into the core algorithm in 2016, Google mostly ignores links it judges spammy instead of demoting the whole site. That sounds forgiving. In practice it means your engineered anchors may simply be worth nothing, and you will never get a notification telling you so.

The data backs this up. An Ahrefs study of more than 384,000 pages across nearly 20,000 keywords found only a weak positive correlation between exact match anchors and rankings. It is a correlation, not proof of cause, but it is a long way from the magic lever the spreadsheets assume.

Which anchor text mistakes actually hurt?

The mistakes that hurt are the ones that create a pattern a human did not choose, plus the ones on your own site that waste a signal you fully own. Here they are in the order I find them on audits.

1. Building links to hit an anchor ratio

The percentage plans come from averaging the backlink profiles of sites that already rank. That average is a side effect of thousands of people linking for their own reasons. Reverse engineering it means deliberately placing links with chosen words, which is the one thing a natural profile never contains.

If your links are earned, the ratio sorts itself out. If they are not, hitting a target percentage is just a tidier way of leaving footprints.

2. Putting exact match anchors in links you paid for

This is the mistake with written consequences. Google’s spam policies list links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites as an example of link spam. Their illustration is a paragraph where “wedding rings”, “best ring” and “wedding dress” each link to the same shop.

When money changes hands, mark the link rel="sponsored" and let the anchor be your brand name. Boring anchors on paid links are cheap insurance.

3. Leaving “click here” and “read more” on your own site

Google names these generic phrases as poor anchor text in its documentation, and they are still everywhere, from blog cards that end in “Read more” to footer links that just say “here”. Every one of those is an internal link where you had full control of the label and wrote nothing.

A restaurant in El Born might have twenty blog posts all linking to its booking page with “click here”. Change those to “book a table in El Born” or “see the tasting menu”, and the same twenty links start describing something.

4. Using one anchor for two different pages

If “SEO audit” links to your audit service page from the homepage but to a blog post from the menu, you are telling Google two pages answer the same thing. That confusion often shows up later as the wrong page ranking, or the two swapping places in Search Console from week to week.

Pick the page that should own each phrase. Then make every internal anchor for that phrase point there and nowhere else.

5. Linked images with an empty alt attribute

A logo that links to your homepage with alt="" is a link with no anchor text at all. The same applies to product grids where the image links to the product page and the alt is blank or says “image1.jpg”. Google is explicit that the alt attribute acts as the anchor text for linked images, so fill it with what the destination is.

6. Linking a Spanish page with English anchors

This one is specific to bilingual sites, and Barcelona is full of them. A Spanish page about “abogado de extranjería” linking to its target with the English words “immigration lawyer” gives Google a mixed signal and gives the Spanish reader a jolt. Write anchors in the language of the page they sit on, pointing to the version of the target in that same language.

How do you check your own anchor text?

Start with Google Search Console, because it is free and it is Google’s own view. Open the Links report and look at Top linking text under External links. That is a list of the words other sites use to link to you.

Read it as a diagnostic. A healthy list for a local business is mostly the brand name and the bare domain, with the odd natural phrase mixed in. If a commercial phrase like “best lawyer Barcelona” sits near the top and you know nobody would write that unprompted, somebody built those links, possibly a previous agency.

For internal links, Search Console will not show you the anchors. Crawl the site with Screaming Frog, then export all inlinks with their anchor text and sort by destination URL. Within ten minutes you will see every page that is linked with “Read more”, and every phrase that points to two different pages.

If you want to compare against competitors, the Anchors report in Ahrefs or Semrush does the same for any domain. Use it to understand the market, not to copy its percentages. When we run an SEO audit, this anchor review is one of the cheaper checks and one of the quickest wins.

What should good anchor text look like?

Good anchor text reads as a natural part of the sentence and would still make sense if you only saw the linked words. Google’s own test is to read the anchor on its own and ask whether it is clear what the destination is.

Compare these two sentences on a Barcelona relocation blog:

• “For the paperwork, click here.”
• “Start with the empadronamiento appointment, because most other procedures ask for the certificate.”

The second is longer, and it is not stuffed. It also happens to be the kind of anchor a journalist would write, which is the standard worth holding your own site to.

For external links you earn, you will rarely choose the words. That is fine. Spend your effort on getting mentioned by publications your customers read, and let them describe you however they like. This is how we approach link building for clients: the placement and the context matter more than whether the anchor contains the keyword.

Where I would start

If you do one thing this week, crawl your own site and fix the internal anchors. It costs nothing, and it is the only part of anchor text where you hold the pen. Rewrite every “Read more” and “click here” into words that describe the destination, and make sure each key phrase points to one page.

Then open Top linking text in Search Console and read the list honestly. If it looks like something a marketing plan produced, I would rather you find out now than after a core update does it for you. If you want a second pair of eyes on either list, get in touch and we will tell you plainly what we see.