Anchor Text Distribution Explained, With Sensible Defaults
How to plan anchor text across a campaign so your profile looks earned rather than engineered, plus the ratios we start from.
Anchor text is one of the few link variables you fully control, which is exactly why over-control is the most common mistake we see in audits.
Natural profiles are messy. They contain brand names, bare URLs, awkward phrases and a lot of sentences that were never optimised for anything.
A sensible starting distribution
- Branded: around 40–50% — your company name in various forms
- Natural language: around 20–25% — 'this guide', 'according to their research'
- Partial match: around 15–20% — a target phrase inside a longer sentence
- Bare URL: around 5–10%
- Exact match: 5% or less, and only on pages that can support it
Why exact match stays small
Exact-match anchors are the strongest relevance signal you can send and the clearest fingerprint of intentional link building. Used sparingly on a profile that is otherwise natural, they help. Used repeatedly, they turn a page into an obvious target.
Plan across the campaign, not per link
The mistake is optimising each placement in isolation. Keep a single anchor ledger across every link you earn, per target page, and let it guide the next brief. If a page has taken three partial-match anchors in a row, the next one should be branded.
Let the host publication win ties
If an editor prefers a different anchor because it reads better in their sentence, take their version. A slightly weaker anchor on a placement that stays live beats a perfect anchor on one that gets stripped in the next content audit.