Anchor text and SEO: how does it affect?

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The relevance of a link depends on many factors, and one of these is the anchor text . Its importance is easy to understand: the search engine takes into account the words with which we are linked to determine what our reference sector is and with which keywords to position ourselves.

As we have already said, it has to satisfy a series of characteristics to "work" correctly both for the user and for the search engine (and thus positively influence positioning):

It should provide as much information as possible about the content it is redirecting to, so that the user, when clicking on it, already knows where they will end up. If this information is not provided directly by the anchor, then it should be in the surrounding text (as in the case of “generic” anchor texts, which we will discuss later).
The information provided must be relevant : it makes no sense, for example, to link to the URL of a linkbuilding post by using “social media” as the anchor text. Trying to manipulate the results through irrelevant anchors could even cost us a penalty (and in fact, many negative SEO attacks are based precisely on sending a lot of backlinks with “strange” anchors to the competitor’s website).
It has to be concise and attractive : Google hardly takes into account very long texts in the anchor text and, in addition, this solution does not look very good aesthetically, resulting in confusion for the user.
The anchors of an ideal backlink profile have to be varied and natural . Even if our links are not spontaneous, they have to appear natural, and varying the anchors (along with other techniques) helps us achieve this goal.
The anchor text before Google Penguin
Before the arrival of Google Penguin , the popular search engine's algorithm gave great importance to anchors. In a 2008 paper , Sergey Brin and Larry Page claimed that not only was the anchor treated in a "special way" when determining search results, but it also allowed Google to determine the topic of a page in the absence of on-page signals.

It is easy to understand that this made it very easy to manipulate search results using black hat techniques (a set of quick and unethical practices that allow for short-term SEO results but which, in most cases, end up being las vegas email marketing address detected by Google and resulting in penalties). For example, exact keywords ( keyword stuffing ) could be used repeatedly as anchors to "suggest" to the search engine the keyword with which to position the page, and also to deceive it using irrelevant keywords.

Grow with us!
A famous case of success of these techniques to manipulate SERPs (known as Google Bombs and often used for political purposes) is the one that affected Silvio Berlusconi in 2006: the politician’s biography, which appeared on the official website of the Italian government, appeared in search results with the words “buffone”, “miserabile” and “fallimento” (buffoon, miserable, failure), even when clicking the button “I’m feeling lucky”. Another very famous case of Google Bombing is that of George W. Bush’s biography, which appeared after searching for the query “miserable failure” for more than 3 years.

Anchors today
Anchor texts and their over-optimization were one of the first targets of Google Penguin , the Google update launched in April 2012 and designed to fight webspam . However, the percentage of queries affected by over-optimized anchors was relatively small. Since then, the idea spread among SEOs that exact match anchors should be completely stopped, and that the only white hat way to do link building was to link to the brand name.

Today, thanks to several studies on the subject (we recommend this interesting post from Ahrefs ), we know that exact keyword anchors still have a strong influence on search results, although they can no longer be used as they were before, since over-optimizing would lead to the risk of being penalized by Penguin. So, the rule to follow in order not to make a mistake, as we already said, is to vary them to achieve a link profile that appears natural.

But what different types of anchors exist?

Types of anchor text
Exact match
In English , exact match refers to an anchor text that corresponds exactly to the target keyword. Example: "linkbuilding" to link a page about linkbuilding.

Partial match
Grow with us!
In English , partial match refers to an anchor that includes a variation of the keyword. Examples: “link building strategies”, “link building techniques”, “posts about link building”, etc. Also included in this category are long and mid tails and anchors that correspond to the title of the page.

Brand
In English branded , they are anchors that use the brand name. They are usually the ones that occupy the highest percentage of a natural link profile.

Naked link
Naked links are links that have the URL as the anchor text.

Generics and call to action

Brand + keyword
They combine brand and keyword. Example: “Seocom link building post.”

The perfect anchor profile
Now that we have seen how many and what types of anchors there are… how do we know what percentage they should be in our profile so that it appears natural?

As we can imagine, there is no ideal anchor distribution percentage . On average, a completely natural link profile has 40/50% branded and naked anchors, 20% generic and the remaining 30/40% between exact and partial match. Likewise, everything will depend on the sector in which we compete, since it is not difficult to find, depending on the niche, slightly over-optimized link profiles that have not been penalized or are completely natural.

For this reason, our advice is to take a closer look at the competition : by looking at the backlink profile of the top 5 competitors in our sector, we can see if we are on the right track or if we should be more careful. Of course, we must be extremely careful, since some websites could, despite not having any penalties, find themselves in a risky situation that we do not want to imitate.