Anchor texts

Anchor texts have an impact on how Google understands the page content. Therefore, it is important to consider which anchor texts are used in your internal and external link building. You need to make sure that your anchor texts are as natural and organic as possible, as Google may find itself penalising the page if it is too over-optimised and mechanical.

As always in search engine optimisation, you should therefore write for the human rather than the machine. Your anchor texts should be descriptive and make it easy for the user to understand what they are getting from the page.

When you're link building, variety is key. A deliberate and mechanical use of keywords in anchor texts is against Google's guidelines and may be penalised. There are typically 6 different types of anchor texts.

1. Brand name: Your company name
2. Web address: Your domain name
3. Keyword: Keyword combined with another text consisting of at least two words
4. Generic: A generic text like "click here"
5. Image: image link without text e.g. a logo
6. Spam: Meaningless text and text of a sexual nature.

There are both external links (backlinks) and internal links. The external links come from one domain, which links to another domain. Internal links are when you link from your own domain to other content on the same domain.

In external anchor texts, there has been a tendency in the past that too hard optimization of the anchor text itself will be penalized by Google. In internal anchor texts, you can usually be a bit more aggressive with keyword usage.