Internal link anchor text: rules and examples

What anchor text is

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. In this HTML, the anchor text is "boot waterproofing guide":

<a href="/guides/waterproof-hiking-boots">boot waterproofing guide</a>

For an image that is a link, there is no text. Google uses the image's alt text as the anchor instead (Google Search Central, Link best practices, updated December 2025). So a linked logo or product photo with an empty alt gives Google nothing to read.

What Google says

Google's link guide is short and clear. The key lines:

• "Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to."
• Weak examples it lists: "Click here", "Read more", "website", "article".
• On keywords: resist the urge to cram every keyword into a link. Ask whether the reader needs those keywords to understand the next page. If not, take them out. Keyword stuffing is against Google's spam policies.
• Context matters too: the words around a link also help Google and readers understand it.

All quotes and examples: Link best practices for Google.

Six anchor rules

1. Name the target page's topic. A reader should be able to guess the page from the link alone.
2. Keep it short. About 2 to 6 words covers most cases. That is our rule of thumb, not a Google number.
3. Put it in a real sentence. "Before a long hike, waterproof your hiking boots." beats a bare list of links.
4. One topic, one target. Never use the same anchor for two different pages. It tells Google two pages are about the same thing.
5. Vary it naturally. Five links to the same page from five posts can use five honest wordings. Do not paste one exact phrase everywhere.
6. Do not chain links. Google's guide shows links placed back to back, each on a few words, as a bad example. Readers cannot tell them apart.

12 before and after examples

All examples use the fictional shop northwind-outdoors.com.

Exact match vs descriptive: what to do

People ask if the anchor should be the exact keyword the target page ranks for. The honest answer:

• A descriptive anchor that names the topic is good. If the page is about "waterproof hiking boots", an anchor like "waterproof hiking boots" is natural and fine.
• The same exact phrase on every link is not. It reads oddly, and stuffed anchors are what Google's guide warns about.
• For internal links, the safe path is natural variety. "waterproof hiking boots", "keep your boots dry", "boot waterproofing guide" can all point to the same page.

A simple test: read the sentence out loud. If the link sounds like it was written for a search engine, rewrite it.

Where anchor text matters most

How to check your anchors

1. Crawl your site with a free crawler (Screaming Frog is free up to 500 URLs) and export the inlinks with anchor text for your key pages.
2. Sort by anchor. Look for "click here", "read more", bare URLs and empty image anchors.
3. Look for one anchor pointing to two different pages, and fix it.
4. Fix the worst offenders on pages that already get clicks first.