What Is Anchor Text? What Google Says Good Link Text Looks Like

What Is Anchor Text, in Google’s Words?

Google defines anchor text in its Link best practices for Google guide (last updated December 10, 2025): “Anchor text (also known as link text) is the visible text of a link. This text tells people and Google something about the page you’re linking to.” Google’s SEO Starter Guide adds that with “appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily understand what your linked pages contain before they visit.”

In code, it is the text inside an anchor element. Google calls the <a> element “also known as anchor element”. In this link, the anchor text is ghost peppers:

<a href="https://example.com/ghost-peppers">ghost peppers</a>

Anchor Text at a Glance

Anchor text is the part of a link people read and Google uses to understand the target page. The table collects the key facts from Google’s documentation, read on October 8, 2026.

Where Anchor Text Comes From

Anchor text has been part of Google’s design since the original 1998 research paper. In “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote that “The text of links is treated in a special way in our search engine”: it is associated not only with the page the link is on but also “with the page the link points to” (Brin and Page, Stanford, section 2.2).

They gave two reasons: “anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves”, and anchors can describe things a text search engine cannot index, “such as images, programs, and databases.” Google’s ranking systems have changed a great deal since 1998, and that paper is history, not a description of how Google ranks today. It explains why anchor text attracted manipulation, and why Google’s current guidance and spam policies both address it.

How Google Uses Anchor Text

Google uses anchor text to understand what a linked page is about. Its link guide says “The better your anchor text, the easier it is for people to navigate your site and for Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.” Google does not publish how much anchor text weighs in ranking, and this article does not guess.

What Google does document is the mechanics:

• The link must be crawlable. Google “can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element … with an href attribute”, and anchor text should be placed “between <a> elements that Google can crawl.”
• Empty links fall back to title. “As a fallback, Google can use the title attribute as anchor text if the <a> element is for some reason empty.”
• Image links use alt. “For images as links, Google uses the alt attribute of the img element as anchor text.” An image link with alt="" has no anchor text at all.
• JavaScript-inserted text must render. If JavaScript adds the anchor text, Google says to “use the URL Inspection Tool to make sure it’s present in the rendered HTML.”
• Surrounding words matter too. “The words before and after links matter, so pay attention to the sentence as a whole.”

What Good Anchor Text Looks Like

Good anchor text, in Google’s words, “is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to.” Google’s test is to read only the link text, out of context: “If you don’t know what the page could be about, you need more descriptive anchor text.” Google’s own examples:

Google also warns against stuffing: “resist the urge to cram every keyword that’s related to the page that you’re linking to (remember, keyword stuffing is a violation of our spam policies).” Its check: “If it feels like you’re forcing keywords into the anchor text, then it’s probably too much.”

Internal links follow the same rules. Google says “Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site” and that “There’s no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain.” External links to sources “can help establish trustworthiness”. Google’s advice is to use nofollow “only when you don’t trust the source”, and sponsored or nofollow for paid links; our explainer on what a nofollow link is covers those values.

When Anchor Text Becomes Link Spam

Anchor text becomes a spam problem when links are placed or paid for in order to manipulate rankings. Google’s spam policies (last updated August 28, 2026) define link spam as “creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings”. One of the listed examples speaks directly to PR work:

“Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites.”

The same list includes “Keyword-rich, hidden, or low-quality links embedded in widgets”, “Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites”, and “Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature”. Google adds that buying and selling links is a normal part of the web’s economy for advertising and sponsorship, and “It’s not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified” with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".

For press releases and paid placements, the practical reading is: use your brand name or a plain description as the anchor, and accept that the link may be nofollowed. In our own check of 70 PR Newswire releases, all 19 external links in release bodies carried rel=nofollow (do wire service links pass SEO value?). For how this plays out with paid articles, see do paid press placements hurt your SEO?

Common Anchor Text Labels

SEO practitioners sort anchor text into types such as branded, exact-match and generic. These labels are industry shorthand, not Google terms: Google’s documentation uses none of them, and it publishes no ideal mix or ratio. The descriptions below are ours; the Google column notes what Google’s guidance says about each kind.

How to Check Your Anchor Text

Check incoming anchor text in Search Console’s Links report, and your own links by reading your pages. Search Console’s “Top linking text” table shows “which link text is used in backlinks to your site”, covering “only links from outside your property” (Links report help). Our step-by-step guide to seeing which sites link to you in Search Console walks through the report.

1. Open Links > External links > Top linking text and select More for the full list.
2. Read it as Google groups it. Duplicates are combined only on “a case-insensitive exact match”, and links with no text appear as “(empty)”.
3. Use it the way Google suggests: “Confirm that the link text is what you expect, and not spammy text” and “Confirm that other sites are describing your site accurately.”
4. For your own pages, read every link out of context, Google’s test, and fix any “click here”, empty image links or chains of adjacent links.

Anchor Text vs Related Terms

Common Misconceptions About Anchor Text

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Methodology

This explainer is built from Google Search Central documentation and Search Console Help, read on October 8, 2026, plus Brin and Page’s 1998 paper for history. Google’s definitions and examples are quoted verbatim. The anchor text type labels are common industry terms that Google does not use; their descriptions are ours. The wire-release figure comes from our own earlier study, linked above. We did not run any ranking test for this article, and we make no claim about how much anchor text weighs in Google’s ranking.

1. official Google Search Central, Link best practices for Google (last updated December 10, 2025).
2. official Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide (last updated December 10, 2025).
3. official Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search (last updated August 28, 2026).
4. official Search Console Help, Links report.
5. research Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Stanford University, 1998, section 2.2.
6. own data Media Morpheus Research, Do Wire Service Links Pass SEO Value? We Checked 70 Releases.