# Anchor text SEO: Fixing your link mix can restore rankings - Episode: P2E03 (Part 2: Link building) - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PCgutn8y8w - Page: https://irongoo.com/videos/anchor-text - Duration: 13:36 - Published: 2026-11-07T16:15:00+05:00 Learn how to spot anchor text patterns that weaken your backlink profile and how a more natural mix can help recover lost rankings. Build an anchor strategy around relevance, context and evidence instead of a supposed safe exact match percentage. ## What this episode covers - What Google's court record and leaked documentation reveal about anchors as relevance and spam signals, plus the limits of that evidence. - The six anchor types and how to audit your most important pages individually. - Three warning signs: commercial phrase concentration, anchors that mismatch their targets, and sudden spikes. - How relevant links with brand, URL and page title anchors can dilute a spammy pattern, and where dilution reaches its limits. - How to improve internal anchors, navigation labels and the sentences surrounding links. ## Key moments - [00:00 Intro](https://irongoo.com/videos/anchor-text?t=0) - [00:43 Why anchors carry weight](https://irongoo.com/videos/anchor-text?t=43) - [02:22 Anchor types and natural profiles](https://irongoo.com/videos/anchor-text?t=142) - [04:14 Auditing and reshaping](https://irongoo.com/videos/anchor-text?t=254) - [07:47 The sentence around the link](https://irongoo.com/videos/anchor-text?t=467) - [08:43 Anchors as a recovery tool](https://irongoo.com/videos/anchor-text?t=523) - [11:35 Two myths, two verdicts](https://irongoo.com/videos/anchor-text?t=695) - [12:49 Wrap up](https://irongoo.com/videos/anchor-text?t=769) ## Transcript ### Intro Most link builders count their links. Almost nobody reads them. Which is odd, because the words on those links are one of three fundamental relevance signals named in the court record of the US antitrust case against Google. The anchor is the one part of a link where somebody else describes your page in their own words. Get the mix right and every new link sharpens what Google thinks your page is about. Get it wrong and the same words turn into a spam pattern, and Google keeps machinery for exactly that pattern. So today: how to read an anchor profile, how to reshape it on purpose, and how anchor work can pull a quietly buried site back up. ### Why anchors carry weight The strongest evidence first. A trial exhibit from the case records a February 2025 call with a Google search engineer. Anchors sit next to body text and clicks as the three fundamental signals. Together they make up topicality: Google's judgement of how relevant a page is to a query. The same exhibit treats PageRank separately, as distance from a known good source, feeding the quality score. So every link does two jobs. PageRank decides how much it's worth. The anchor says what it's about. Everybody obsesses over the first job. This episode is about the second. Google dropped a clue in 2019 that most people skipped. When it turned nofollow into a hint, it explained why it would keep reading those links: the words within links describe the content they point at. Google wants your anchor even when the link may pass no credit at all. Then came the 2024 leak of Google's internal API documentation. Google keeps a hash of the terms near each anchor, so the surrounding words are stored too. There's a field called anchor mismatch demotion. And there's a whole record for spikes of spammy anchor phrases, with a field described as the combined penalty for anchor demotion. Somebody at Google spent real time on this. The usual ceiling applies. The leak shows what Google stores, not how much each field weighs, and not whether each one is still in use. What it does settle is direction. Google reads anchors as a relevance clue and as a spam pattern at the same time, and anchor optimisation lives in the gap between the two. ### Anchor types and natural profiles Every anchor fits one of six types. Brand. Bare URL. Page title. Partial match, which is your topic plus other words. Exact match, the precise query you want to rank for. And generic: click here, this site, read more. Here's how that plays out on ReelRadar, our fictional film trailer and where to watch site. Take its page on where to stream classic horror films. A film blogger who likes it links with the brand, the address, the page title, or something like this guide to classic horror on streaming. Someone buying links types watch classic horror films online. Every single time. Here's a self check you can do over coffee. Read your anchors out loud. If they sound like people recommending something, you're fine. If they sound like someone typing into a search box, over and over, you're looking at a buyer's profile, and so is Google. Why is the blogger so varied? Because real people link for their own reasons, in their own words, and they usually name the thing they're recommending. That's why brand and address anchors make up so much of a healthy profile. Exact match still turns up, just as a minority, spread out over time. Put the two profiles side by side and you don't need a tool. Natural on the left: mostly brand and address, a spread of titles and partial phrases, a thin slice of exact match. Manipulated on the right: one commercial phrase owns the whole chart. There are no percentages on screen, and that's deliberate. We'll get to why. A word for generic anchors, since people love to call them wasted. Inside your own site, Google's documentation says click here and read more are too vague, and it's right. In your external profile they do a different job. Real people write them constantly, so a profile with none at all is its own small oddity. ### Auditing and reshaping Auditing your profile takes an afternoon. Search Console's Links report has a top linking text table for the whole site. For one specific page, export its backlinks from any third party tool. Tag every anchor with one of the six types, then judge each important page on its own rather than the domain as a whole. Then look for three red flags. Concentration: one commercial phrase carrying a big share of a page's anchors. Mismatch: anchors about one topic pointing at a page about something else. Timing: a pile of similar phrases arriving in a short window, which is exactly the kind of spike that leaked anchor spam record is built to catch. Mismatch is the one people miss. Say an old campaign pointed cheap phone deals anchors at ReelRadar's trailer pages. Forget the spam question for a second. Those words describe a different page from the one they land on, so at best they add nothing. And that leaked mismatch field suggests Google has a name for the situation. So what should your mix look like? Not a number from a blog post. Pull the anchor profiles of pages that rank well in your own niche and see how they spread across the six types. That's a realistic picture of your market, and it usually shows far more brand and address anchors than people expect. Now the part most guides skip. You can reshape an anchor profile on purpose, and it works. We've done it on real campaigns, and it's mostly about adding, not deleting. New links carrying brand, address, title and partial anchors shift the mix until the profile looks like a site people genuinely talk about. One thing not to do: panic delete. An exact match link that a real blogger gave you of their own accord is a perfectly good link, and removing it helps nobody. You're changing the shape of the whole profile, not hunting individual anchors. Where do the new anchors come from? Mostly links you should be earning anyway: press coverage, partner and supplier pages, listings you genuinely belong in, digital PR. The only change is that you stop asking for the money phrase. When a partner asks how to link to you, the answer is your brand name or the page title. Second lever: anchors pointing at the wrong page. Over the years links pile onto URLs that were never meant to own a topic, like an old news post, a merged page or the homepage. If a link's words describe a page you have now, ask the linking site to update the target, or redirect the old URL to the page that truly matches. Third lever, and the one you fully own: internal anchors. Google says good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to both the page it's on and the page it links to. So ReelRadar's film pages should link to the horror streaming guide with words about horror streaming. Not read more. Read more is not a topic. An easy win hides in your navigation. Menus full of labels like explore, more or discover pass value with words that say nothing. ReelRadar's menu said browse. Now it says where to watch, release dates and trailers, and every page on the site repeats those words to the right targets. One internal trap. If three ReelRadar pages all receive the anchor release dates, you've told Google three pages own one topic. Pick the owner and point that phrase only there. The other pages still get links, with words that describe what they actually are. ### The sentence around the link Now zoom out from the anchor to the sentence around it. Google's link documentation says the words before and after a link matter, so pay attention to the sentence as a whole. And the leak shows Google stores a hash of the terms near each anchor. The anchor is the headline. The sentence explains why the link exists. Quick test. Same link, two sentences. One: ReelRadar keeps a dated list of where each classic horror film is streaming in the UK. Two: the BEST horror site EVER, click here now for amazing deals. One reads like an editor chose it. The other reads like an invoice. That's why placement matters as much as wording. A link inside a relevant paragraph, written the way an editor writes, carries a clear meaning. A link jammed into a sales sentence carries a muddy one. Google even warns against chaining links side by side, because each one loses its surrounding text. ### Anchors as a recovery tool Now the part with real money attached. Sometimes a site sinks with no message in Search Console. No manual action, nothing in the report. Rankings just slide after a run of bought or automated links, usually heavy on exact match. That pattern points to an algorithmic hit, not a manual one. Google has told us how its link spam system behaves since 2016. When Penguin joined the core algorithm, Google said it runs in real time and devalues spam by adjusting rankings based on spam signals, rather than hitting the whole site. Changes land after Google recrawls the pages. So when the signals change, the assessment can change too. Before you blame the anchors, rule out the alternatives. Does the drop line up with a confirmed update on Google's Search Status Dashboard? Did the pages with the worst anchors fall harder than the rest? Did anything else change on the site that week? If clean pages held while over optimised ones sank, you have your answer. Claim number one. Anchor optimisation still works, and it can bring back a site that was quietly buried for its anchors. It does. When the problem is an anchor pattern, the best way back we've seen is dilution. Keep adding genuinely relevant links with natural anchors until the bad pattern is a minority of the profile, not its headline. If you or an old agency built the bad links, remove what you can and disavow the rest, because that's exactly the case Google's disavow page describes. Why would dilution work? Look at what the leaked anchor spam record measures: the fraction of a page's anchors that are spammy phrases, and how fast they were discovered. Every natural link you add lowers that fraction. That's our reading of the documents, not a Google statement, and it matches what we see in the field. On ReelRadar it would look like this. The horror page sank after a link package, the clean film pages held, and there was no message. So the package stops, the bought links get disavowed, and the new links come from real reasons to link: a data story film writers pick up, festival partners, honest listings. Each arrives with a brand or title anchor. Most dilution attempts still fail, for boring reasons. People add more links with the same money phrase, which feeds the pattern instead of diluting it. They buy cheap links from weak sites that pass little and add a fresh footprint. Or they stop before Google has recrawled enough of the web to notice. It's precision work, done patiently. And dilution has a limit. It works when the bad pattern is a slice of the profile. When thousands of links carry irrelevant terms or exact match money phrases, each natural link barely moves the share. That's where fixing anchors stops being enough, and where the recovery episode picks up, with two real rescues, including a dental clinic that came to us carrying a lot of spammy backlinks. ### Two myths, two verdicts Claim number two. There's a safe exact match percentage. Stay under the magic number and you're fine. We looked for that number in Google's documentation, the leaked fields and the court record. It isn't there. The leak stores the share of spammy phrases and how fast they arrive, but no threshold. Every percentage you've heard is somebody's average of other sites, and other sites aren't your niche or your history. Watch the pattern instead: concentration, mismatch, spikes. Claim number three. Exact match is always best, because it tells Google precisely what you want to rank for. It does tell Google precisely what you want. That's the problem. Google's spam policy lists optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts and press releases as link spam. One exact match anchor from an independent, relevant page is a fine thing to have. A profile built on them is a signature. Google even prints an example on its policy page, and it's a small masterpiece of bad SEO. Every link is a commercial phrase, and the sentences only exist to hold the links. Nobody writing for a reader would put them there. If your anchors would feel at home in this paragraph, change them. ### Wrap up The episode on one screen. Anchors are a named relevance signal in the court record. Optimising them on purpose works, including as a way back from an algorithmic hit. Safe percentages are folklore, and exact match everywhere is the classic spam signature. Your homework this week. Export the anchors for your five most important pages, tag them by type, and look for concentration, mismatch and spikes. Fix the internal anchors first, because you own them. Then plan where your next brand led links will come from. The anchor profile audit template and a target mix planning sheet are free on the episode page at irongoo.com. Next: the real risk map, and why most bad links get ignored rather than punished.