Anchor Text That Helps Rankings Without Spamming

Every link on a web page makes a small promise. The words you can click are a claim about what is on the other side. Click here promises nothing. Cheap flights to Lisbon promises something specific. The entire discipline of anchor text, stripped of jargon, is the discipline of making that promise accurate.

I find it useful to think about why anchor text matters to search engines at all, because the history explains the present. Early search engines noticed something clever: the text people use when linking to a page is a description of that page written by someone other than its author. If a thousand pages link to a document using the words tax calculator, that is strong evidence the document is a tax calculator, evidence the document’s author could not easily fake. Anchor text was valuable precisely because it was testimony from third parties.

Then, inevitably, people started faking the testimony. If links saying tax calculator make you rank for tax calculator, why not manufacture thousands of them, or rewrite every internal link on your own site to repeat the phrase? For a while this worked, which is why you still meet pages where every link is the same optimized phrase, stacked like sandbags. But search engines adapted, as they always do when a signal gets gamed. A backlink profile where every anchor is the same commercial phrase does not look like popularity anymore. It looks like a campaign. Unnatural anchor patterns went from an advantage to a liability, and the sites that leaned hardest into the trick were the ones penalized for it.

The pendulum should not swing to the other failure, though, and the other failure is far more common on the sites I audit. It is the sea of click here, read more, and learn more. These anchors are not spammy. They are empty. They fail readers before they fail rankings: a person scanning a page reads the links first, because links are visually distinct, and a page whose links all say read more is a page that cannot be scanned. They fail accessibility too, and concretely. Screen reader users often pull up a list of all links on a page to navigate quickly, and a list that reads click here, click here, learn more, click here is useless. The link text is supposed to work out of context, and click here has no meaning outside its sentence.

So the practical rule is almost embarrassingly simple: the anchor should say what the destination is. Not click here to see our pricing, but see our pricing, with the last three words as the link. Not read more, but the actual subject of the more. This is not an SEO trick layered on top of writing. It is just writing, the same principle that says a sentence should not point at its meaning but contain it.

For internal links, the ones between pages of your own site, you have total control, and the temptation to optimize is strongest there. Some optimization is legitimate. If you have a page about invoice templates, internal links to it should probably say invoice templates rather than this page, because you are helping both readers and crawlers understand what the page is. What you should not do is contort every mention into the same exact phrase, or link the phrase every single time it appears, or bolt keyword-laden links into paragraphs where they do not belong. Vary the anchors the way natural references vary. Sometimes the full phrase, sometimes a shortened one, sometimes the page’s actual title. If your internal links read like a person referring to another page, you are doing it right. If they read like a database of keywords, you have crossed the line, and the line is visible to anyone who reads the page aloud.

External anchor text, the links other sites point at you, is mostly out of your hands, and that is fine. The honest way to influence it is to give pages clear, specific titles, because people tend to link using your title. A page called Ten Thoughts is hard to link to descriptively. A page called How to Read a HAR File links itself.

When GazeSite crawls a page, vague anchors are one of the findings I see most often, and I have come to read them as a symptom rather than a disease. A site full of click here is usually a site where pages were written one at a time, each in isolation, with links added as an afterthought. The fix costs minutes per link. Read each one and ask whether the clickable words, standing alone, tell you where you will land. If they do, the link helps the reader, describes the destination, and gives search engines exactly the honest signal they were built to reward. The promise and its keeping turn out to be the same act.