Links & authority

Anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable words of a link. It tells search engines what the destination page is about, which makes it both a strong signal and a common source of over-optimisation.

A natural profile is messy: brand names, bare URLs, "read more", partial phrases and the occasional exact-match keyword. A profile where forty per cent of external anchors are the same commercial phrase looks manufactured because it is, and it is one of the patterns link spam systems are explicitly built to detect.

Internally, anchors are entirely under your control and worth using well. Describe the destination in the words a reader would use, vary them naturally across the site, and avoid linking hundreds of pages with an identical anchor, which flattens the signal rather than strengthening it.

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