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The Ratios Are Made Up
Almost every guide on this subject contains a table specifying that some percentage of your anchors should be branded, some partial match, some generic, and under five percent exact match. Google has never published such a distribution. The numbers were invented, then copied, and are now cited as though they were documentation.
What analyses of ranking pages actually tend to find is not a careful balance but an absence: exact-match commercial anchors are uncommon among pages that rank well, because natural references mostly use brand names, page titles, or descriptive phrases. The finding is "this rarely happens naturally", which is a different claim from "keep it under five percent".
The distinction matters because the ratio framing invites the wrong behaviour. It encourages people to manufacture a distribution, deliberately ordering some branded anchors and some generic ones to hit a target, which is precisely the artificial pattern the guidance was supposedly protecting against. Writing honest descriptions produces a natural distribution for free.
Internal and External Are Different Problems
You write your internal anchors, so they are a statement of intent about your own site. You do not write external anchors, so a uniform pattern in them implies someone was asked. That asymmetry explains almost all sensible advice in this area.
| Context | What to aim for | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Internal links | Descriptive phrases naming what the destination covers | Identical anchor repeated everywhere, or "read more" |
| Navigation and footers | Short, consistent, human labels | Keyword-stuffed menu items that read oddly to visitors |
| Earned external links | Whatever the author naturally wrote | Requesting a specific commercial phrase at scale |
| Guest contributions | Brand or descriptive, in a genuinely relevant sentence | Exact-match commercial anchor in an author bio |
| Paid or affiliate placements | Qualified with the right attribute; anchor is secondary | Unqualified, which is the actual violation, per link attributes |
The last row is where most anchor anxiety is misdirected. If a link was paid for, the problem is not the wording, it is that the link passes ranking signals without qualification. Getting the anchor "natural" on a bought link does not fix anything; it just makes the violation harder to spot, which is a different objective entirely.
Writing Anchors That Do Their Job
The test is whether the anchor makes sense read aloud, on its own, with no surrounding sentence. That single check catches almost every anchor problem worth fixing and happens to be exactly how screen reader users encounter your links.
- Name the destination, not the action.
"the internal linking guide" rather than "click here". The reader learns where they are going before they commit, which improves the click quality as well as the signal.
- Vary it naturally between pages.
Different contexts call for different phrasings of the same destination, and that variation is what real writing looks like. Do not manufacture variation to hit a distribution; simply write each sentence as the sentence requires.
- Keep it inside the sentence.
An anchor embedded in prose carries context that a bare link on its own line does not. The words around the link inform what it means, and that context now does much of the work the anchor used to do alone.
- Do not link the same phrase to two destinations.
Using one phrase for two different pages is a contradiction about which page owns that topic, and it contributes directly to cannibalization.
- Never link a whole paragraph.
Long anchors dilute meaning, look like a mistake, and are miserable to navigate with assistive technology. A few words is the useful range.
Auditing What You Already Have
Two checks find most of the value. Pull every internal link pointing at your important pages and look at the anchors as a set. Then list the anchors used across the whole site and look for phrases pointing to more than one destination.
The first check usually reveals that your most commercially important page is linked almost entirely as "here" and "services", while a minor blog post has twelve descriptive anchors. That mismatch is a straightforward fix and it is the closest thing to free improvement available on an established site. The internal link planner will show you where links currently point, and the wider method is in the internal linking strategy guide.
The second check catches the contradictions. Where one phrase links to two pages, decide which page owns it and repoint the rest. This is frequently the cheapest available fix for competing pages, and it often resolves the contest without touching URLs at all, which is the approach recommended in keyword cannibalization.
Questions People Ask About Anchor Text
- What is anchor text and does it still matter?
Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link. It still matters, because it is one of the clearest statements available about what the destination page is about, and it is read by search systems, screen readers, and AI agents alike. What has changed is that surrounding context now carries much of the weight that exact wording used to.
- What is the ideal anchor text ratio?
Nobody knows, and the specific percentage tables circulating in most guides were invented rather than measured. Google has never published a ratio, and analyses of top-ranking pages tend to find exact-match anchors are rare rather than carefully proportioned. Write anchors that describe the destination and the distribution takes care of itself.
- Should internal links use keyword-rich anchor text?
Descriptive, yes; repetitively identical, no. Internal anchors are entirely under your control, which makes them a legitimate way to state what a page is about, and they tolerate far more specificity than external links. The failure mode is using the exact same phrase for every internal link to a page, which reads as mechanical rather than helpful.
- Can bad anchor text get me penalised?
Manipulative external anchor patterns are a documented spam concern, particularly where they accompany paid or exchanged links. Your own internal linking is not going to trigger that. The realistic risk sits with link building campaigns that request identical commercial anchors at scale, which is a pattern that has been detectable for over a decade.
- What should I do about 'click here' links?
Replace them, for reasons that have nothing to do with rankings. Screen reader users navigate by pulling up a list of links, and a page of 'click here' entries is unusable. Descriptive anchors serve those users, tell search systems what the destination covers, and help agents choose the right link. It is one change with three beneficiaries.
