Anchor text examples that work (and ones to avoid)

The fastest way to understand anchor text is to read good and bad anchor text examples side by side. The rules are simple to state — be descriptive, read naturally, tell the truth — but they land harder when you see two anchors pointing at the same page and feel the difference in clarity. This page collects practical anchor text examples: the anchors that pass a strong signal to search engines, the ones that throw it away, and a short method for turning the second kind into the first. For the full background on why anchors carry weight, see the complete guide to anchor text.

Good vs. bad: the same link, two ways

Imagine you are linking to a page titled "How to find orphan pages on your site." Here is the same link written well and written badly.

• Good: "start by learning how to find your orphan pages" — descriptive, names the topic, reads naturally.
• Bad: "to find orphan pages, click here" — the link words say nothing; the topic is wasted on "click here."

The destination is identical. The only thing that changed is the words inside the link — and those words are exactly what a search engine reads as a description of the page. Google's guidance is explicit that link text should give "an accurate idea of what the linked page is about," which the first version does and the second does not.

Descriptive anchor text examples (the ones that work)

Strong anchors name the destination's topic or give a concrete reason to follow the link:

• "how to find orphan pages on your site"
• "orphan pages are published content nothing links to"
• "our internal linking best practices"
• "fix orphan pages in WordPress"
• "the anchor text you choose for each link"

Each of these tells a reader — and a crawler — what waits on the other side. They are also phrases that fit naturally inside a sentence, which is the second half of the job. An anchor that is descriptive but awkwardly bolted on still reads worse than one that flows.

Generic anchor text examples (the ones to avoid)

Generic anchors are reused boilerplate that carry no topical signal at all:

• "click here"
• "read more"
• "learn more"
• "this guide"
• "here"
• "find out"

There is nothing grammatically wrong with them — they are just a wasted opportunity. Every "click here" is a link whose words could have described its destination and instead described nothing. If you do one anchor-text audit in your life, search your site for "click here" and "read more" and rewrite each one to name what it points to.

Exact-match, partial-match, and branded examples

Among descriptive anchors there are grades, and a healthy page mixes them. (The complete guide covers each type in depth; here is how they read in practice.)

• Exact-match — the destination's exact title or keyword. "internal linking for SEO" pointing to a page called "Internal linking for SEO." The clearest signal; safe for your own internal links where you control both ends.
• Partial-match — part of the phrase. "internal linking" for a page on "internal linking best practices." Descriptive and natural; the easiest type to use day to day.
• Branded — a name. "recto's approach to linking" or "Ahrefs' anchor text guide." Trusted and natural when the brand is the relevant thing.

Ahrefs' anchor text research reaches the practical conclusion most SEOs do: vary the type, keep every anchor relevant, and never let all your anchors collapse into the same exact-match phrase — that pattern reads as optimised rather than written.

Misleading anchor text examples (subtle but damaging)

The hardest mistakes to spot are anchors that are descriptive but wrong:

• "the best internal linking tool" → pointing to a page that compares tools rather than naming one. The anchor over-promises.
• "WordPress internal linking" → pointing to a general guide with no WordPress content. The anchor mismatches the destination.
• "15 internal linking tips" → pointing to a page that now lists 10. An honest anchor gone stale.

None of these is malicious, but each breaks the small contract an anchor makes with a reader: the words should accurately describe where the link goes. Search engines have decades of data on the relationship between anchor text and real page content, and they discount anchors that oversell.

How to fix a weak anchor

The method is short and works every time. First, find the destination's real topic — what is the page actually about? Second, look at the sentence where the link lives and find a phrase already there that touches that topic. Third, wrap that phrase in the link instead of inventing new words. When the anchor is a phrase you already wrote, the link feels earned by the context and the page reads like prose, not like something optimised.

This is the principle behind recto's approach to internal links: rather than rewriting your content to create anchors, it finds a phrase already in your text that fits the destination and links that. The anchor stays descriptive, the sentence stays natural, and you skip the moment a reader notices a link was bolted on. For the deeper treatment of choosing anchors specifically for links between your own pages, see anchor text for internal links.

Auditing your anchors at scale

On a small site you can spot weak anchors by eye. On a few hundred pages you cannot, and that is where a list helps. A desktop crawler such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, or the Links report inside Google Search Console, can export every internal link and its anchor text in one pass. Sort that export and the patterns jump out: a cluster of "click here" anchors, a page whose every inbound link uses the identical exact-match phrase, an anchor that no longer matches a page you have since rewritten. From there it is a worklist, not a hunt — you rewrite the generic ones, vary the repetitive ones, and correct the mismatches. The point of the export is to turn a vague "our anchors could be better" into a concrete, finite set of edits you can actually finish.

A second pass worth doing is on your highest-value pages specifically. Pull the anchors pointing at the pages that earn revenue or rank near the top of page two, and make sure each one describes the destination accurately. Those are the anchors where a small improvement is most likely to move something.

Where these examples fit

Anchor text is the last mile of a larger internal linking strategy. The best-worded anchor on a page nobody links to still will not rank that page — authority and relevance of the source matter too. But because anchors sit so close to writing you already have, fixing them is among the cheapest, highest-leverage SEO work available. Run the search for your generic anchors, rewrite each one to describe its destination, and verify the change landed in the published HTML. A morning of that, across your existing links, sharpens the signal pointing at every page you care about — without publishing a single new word.