The anchor types, with examples
| Type | Example | Typical in natural profiles? |
|---|---|---|
| Branded | "Avner Badach" | Very common — usually the largest share |
| Naked URL | "avnerbadach.com" | Common |
| Title / topic | "this guide to backlink audits" | Common |
| Partial match | "how to audit your backlinks" | Moderately common |
| Exact match | "backlink audit services" | Rare in the wild |
| Generic | "click here", "this article" | Common |
| Image (alt text) | logo or screenshot link | Common |
Here's the observation that makes everything else make sense: when a blogger genuinely recommends something, they link with the brand name, the article title, or 'this post.' Almost nobody organically writes your money keyword and links it to your commercial page. So when search engines see a profile where a large share of anchors are keyword-exact commercial phrases, the most probable explanation is that the site's owner chose those anchors — meaning the links were placed, not earned.
What a healthy profile looks like
I won't give you a fake-precise formula, because natural profiles vary by niche, brand strength, and page type. But across the honest profiles I've audited, the shape is consistent: branded and URL anchors form the clear majority, topic and partial-match anchors form a healthy middle, and exact-match commercial anchors are a small single-digit sliver — often near zero for newer sites. Homepages skew branded; deep informational pages earn more title and topic anchors. If your commercial pages have more exact-match anchors than your homepage has branded ones, that's the inversion that gets profiles flagged.
Anchor text on links you control vs. links you earn
- Internal links: you control these fully, and Google expects them to be descriptive — use clear, varied, honestly descriptive anchors here. This is where anchor relevance belongs.
- Editorial links you earn: you don't choose the anchor, and you shouldn't try to. If a journalist asks how to reference you, suggest your brand or the resource's title.
- Guest contributions and quotes: link with your name or brand. A bylined article whose body anchor is your money keyword is a pattern reviewers know well.
- Directories and profiles: brand name and URL, always — these exist to identify you, not describe your keywords.
Fixing an over-optimized profile
- Inventory every anchor pointing at each key page and classify it by the types above — you need the actual distribution, not a feeling.
- Identify the concentration: usually one or two money pages carrying an unnatural share of exact-match anchors from low-quality sources.
- Where the linking sites are real and reachable, request an anchor change to brand or title — some will oblige.
- Where the links come from link networks or spam, handle them as a toxic-link problem (see my toxic backlinks guide) rather than an anchor problem.
- Dilute deliberately: the sustainable fix is earning new links that arrive with naturally boring anchors — digital PR mentions, linkable assets, editorial citations. Time plus natural links normalizes most profiles.
- Stop the source: fix whatever process created the pattern, or you'll be back here in a year.
Anchor text in the AI-search era
One newer reason to keep anchors branded: AI engines resolve entities. A web full of links and mentions that say your brand name teaches every system — search and generative alike — who you are and what you're associated with. Exact-match anchors optimize for an algorithm from 2010; branded anchors build the entity signal that today's systems, per Ahrefs' AI visibility research, actually reward.