# Anchor text

> Why anchor text is read as third-party testimony about a page, what over-optimised anchors look like, and why exact-match ratios are a weak thing to chase.

Source: https://netweft.com/glossary/anchor-text
Updated: 2026-09-12

**The visible, clickable words of a hyperlink. Search engines read it as a description of the destination, which makes it one of the few signals about a page that is written by somebody other than that page's owner.**

Anchor text matters for a reason that is easy to miss: it is one of the few
descriptions of a page that the page's own author did not write. A title tag is
a claim. A hundred external links calling the page "postgres connection
pooling" is corroboration.

**Internal anchors are yours to fix and usually neglected.** A site that links
to its own pages with "click here", "read more" and "this guide" is throwing
away the one signal it has complete control over. Descriptive internal anchors
cost nothing and are the cheapest structural improvement most sites have
available.

**External anchors are not yours, and chasing them looks like what it is.** A
natural link profile contains brand names, bare URLs, "here", the page title,
and a long tail of near-misses. A profile where a third of external anchors are
the same commercial phrase is a profile that was bought, and it reads that way
to a reviewer as well as to an algorithm.

There is no correct exact-match ratio to aim for, and the ratios published as
targets are back-formed from small samples of sites that rank for other
reasons. What can be measured is what the anchors actually are, which is part
of what a [backlink report](/features/backlinks) returns.