Writing anchors that do not look bought

Anchor text is the single most controllable signal in a netlinking campaign, and the one most people get wrong in the same direction: too optimised, too repetitive, too obviously chosen by someone who wants to rank.

The goal is not to avoid keywords in anchors. The goal is to look like a site that people reference for real reasons.

The anchor types you are actually choosing between

Every anchor falls into one of a handful of shapes:

A profile that is 80% partial-match with a scatter of branded, generic and long-tail anchors looks like a site people cite. A profile that is 60% exact-match looks like a budget.

The distribution that works

There is no magic ratio, and anyone selling you one is guessing. But the shape below holds up across most campaigns:

• 50-60% partial match and long-tail phrases, where the anchor contains your topic but reads as a sentence fragment
• 20-25% branded, meaning your company or product name, alone or in a phrase
• 10-15% generic and naked URLs, such as "this article", "the full guide", or the bare domain
• Under 5% exact match, reserved for your one or two genuinely important commercial pages

The important part is not hitting these numbers exactly. It is that no single anchor string repeats. Two links with the identical anchor is already a small pattern. Five is a signature, and it is one of the clearest signals that a profile was bought.

Writing an anchor that reads like editorial

The test is simple. Take your anchor and drop it into a sentence a writer might plausibly publish:

If you want to go deeper, ___ covers the whole process step by step.

Now try it with each of these:

• ✅ "this guide to organising a bachelor party in Krakow" sounds like a person wrote it
• ✅ "an SEO agency based in Grenoble" is descriptive, natural, and contains the topic
• ❌ "bachelor party Krakow" is not how anybody writes
• ❌ "SEO agency Grenoble cheap" is a search query wearing a costume

Three habits produce good anchors consistently:

Start from the page's real topic, not from the keyword. Read what the page is actually about, then describe it. The keyword will end up in there naturally because the page is about the keyword. If you are unsure what a page's real topic is in Google's eyes, its top queries in Search Console will tell you.

Add a connective word. "an", "the", "this", "a guide to", "how to". These tiny words are what separate a phrase from a query.

Vary the grammatical shape. Some anchors as noun phrases ("an online Excel course"), some as verb phrases ("learn Excel from scratch"), some as questions ("how do you learn Excel"). A profile where every anchor has the same grammatical structure is still a pattern, even if the words differ.

Varying anchors across a campaign

The hard case is multiple links to the same page, which you will do, because your best page deserves more than one link.

Do not write five variations of one idea. Write five anchors that approach the page from five different angles.

For a page about organising bachelor parties in Krakow:

1. "organising a bachelor party in Krakow"
2. "a weekend in Krakow with friends"
3. "this Krakow stag do guide"
4. "planning a group trip to Poland"
5. "what to do in Krakow for a bachelor party"

Each one is topically correct, each one could plausibly appear in a different article written by a different person, and none of them is a copy of another.

If you are running this monthly across many pages, keeping the history matters more than the cleverness. You cannot vary what you cannot remember. Log every anchor you have used per target URL and check the list before writing the next one. At agency volume that log is the difference between real variation and the illusion of it.

The mistakes that cost the most

Reusing your site's default anchor for every link. Some tools and marketplaces let you set one anchor at the site level. It is convenient and it is the worst possible setting, because every link you buy then carries the same string.

Optimising the anchor for a keyword the page does not rank for. If the page ranks for "excel training" and you anchor it as "advanced excel macros", you are pulling the page toward a topic it has no authority on. Anchors should reinforce, not redirect.

Ignoring the surrounding text. The sentence around your anchor matters nearly as much as the anchor. A perfect anchor inside a paragraph that has nothing to do with your topic is a wasted link. When a marketplace lets you send a brief to the writer, use it to describe the context you want, not just the anchor.