Anchor text

The visible, clickable words of a link. They tell people and Google something about the page the link points to.

Also called link text.

Google calls anchor text “the visible text of a link”, and says good anchor text is “descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to” (Google Search Central).

Writing it

Google’s examples of anchor text that’s too generic include “Click here” and “Read more”. To check yours, it suggests reading only the anchor text, out of context, and asking whether it makes sense by itself.

Google also warns against cramming in every keyword related to the page you’re linking to: keyword stuffing breaks its spam policies.

When an image is the link, Google uses the image’s alt attribute as the anchor text, so give linked images descriptive alt text.

In links to your site

Google’s examples of link spam include links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites, and forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature (Google Search Central).

Related terms

• Alt text
• Link spam

Tools for it

• Link building and backlink tools

Sources

• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable (Oct 8, 2026)
• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies (Oct 8, 2026)

Updated Oct 8, 2026.