Digital marketing term
Anchor Text
The clickable words of a link, telling people and search engines what the destination is about. Internally they guide paths; on backlinks they carry a topical hint.
Detailed explanation
Anchor text ranges from ‘click here’ to a brand name to an exact-match query. Internal links carry meaning between sections; inbound links hint at the target URL’s topic. A pasted naked URL is still an anchor type.
Heavy exact-match anchors, especially on paid or profile links, read as spam. Locking every internal link to one keyword also looks unnatural. Hidden or irrelevant anchors sit in the same risk bucket as hidden text.
A healthy mix is brand, naked URL, partial match, and generic phrases. Internally, write short descriptive labels and do not clone them. Nofollow on a sponsored outbound link does not erase the words; policy and wording are separate jobs.
Frequently asked questions
- Should every backlink be exact match?
- No. Natural profiles lean brand, URL, and partial match. Inflating exact match looks like manipulation.
- Is ‘click here’ harmful?
- A few are fine. For accessibility and SEO, a short phrase that names the destination does more work.
Related terms
Internal links for the topic cluster — read these concepts together.
- BacklinkA backlink is a link from another website to your page; it is an important authority and discovery signal for search engines.
- Inbound LinksLinks on other websites that point to your pages—the same idea as backlinks. Links between your own URLs are internal links and do not count as inbound.
- Off-Page SEORanking work that happens off your HTML: links, mentions, and brand search on other sites. Title tags stay on-page; a vote from another domain is off-page.
- SEOSEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the set of technical and content practices that help a website rank more visibly in organic search results.
- Nofollow LinkA Nofollow Link is an HTML attribute added to a link that tells search engines not to pass authority, or link equity, through that link.
- External LinkA link from your page to a different hostname. Use it to cite a source or send someone deeper—not as a ranking trick or a farm of outbound URLs that add noise.