Link Anchor Optimization : How to choose the right keywords
Optimising link anchors is a crucial SEO strategy for improving the visibility of your website. It involves carefully selecting the keywords to be used in your link anchors to maximise their relevance and effectiveness. Well-chosen keywords can not only attract more traffic to your site, but also improve your ranking in search results. In this article, we'll explain how to choose the right keywords to optimise your link anchors.
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The historical context of link anchors and their algorithmic weighting
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin published their seminal paper on PageRank in 1998, they gave the link anchor an almost disproportionate role compared to the rest of the page content. At the time, the Web was barely structured; the anchor served as a human mini-criticism indicating what the target of the hyperlink related to. Expressions such as "click here" or "www.example.com" dominated, and the stuffing of exact expressions ("cheap flights", "buy viagra") went unnoticed. Precisely because the ancestor of the
re benefited from a strong algorithmic signal that it quickly fell prey to over-optimisation strategies. As early as 2003, Google launched the "Florida" update, which reduced the weight of repeated exact anchors, foreshadowing the "Penguin" update of April 2012. Understanding this legacy is crucial: anchors are no longer managed in a technical silo, but in an ecosystem of interconnected signals (intent, entities, UX).
Designing a natural anchor profile
In a modern link profile audit, we don't try to push a magic ratio of 33 % brand, 33 % naked, 33 % optimised anchors; the aim is to reflect the linguistic ecosystem of your sector in a granular way. A B2C e-commerce site in DTC (direct-to-consumer) mode will intuitively have more "brand" anchors than a niche marketplace where users spontaneously share raw URLs on Reddit or Discord. The golden rule is to measure the divergence from the sector average rather than following a universal recipe. To this end, we calculate a point variation indicator: for each target keyword, we measure the exact anchor rate of the top three organic competitors and compare this ratio with our own. Over-exposure of more than two standard deviations suggests over-optimisation. It's not just a question of algorithms: an unnatural profile is also of concern to the Compliance or PR teams in the event of a partnership review.
Types of anchors
There are six operational archetypes:
1. Exact match: "light safety shoes
2. Partial match: "Best safety shoes
3. Extended long tread: "discover our lightweight S3-certified safety shoes
4. Trademark: "Caterpillar®
5. Generic anchor / CTA: " view models
6. Naked URL: "https://exemple.com/categorie/chaussures-securite
In the B2B sector, generic anchors are often synonymous with "download the PDF file", whereas in the B2C SaaS sector, CTAs such as "start trial" are favoured. These choices are not neutral: semantic variation indirectly influences brand perception. A Tone of Voice diagnostic can be used to align the anchor typology with the overall editorial identity.
Methods for finding relevant keywords for anchors
Choosing the right keywords for an anchor comes down to mapping the user intent behind each target URL. Unlike the choice of keywords for on-page content, the anchor must sometimes refrain from replicating the main expression in order to avoid cannibalisation or hyper-optimisation. A tried and tested workflow consists of :
1. Segment the tree into thematic clusters using a Louvain algorithm or K-means based on N-gram co-occurrences.
2. Select the dominant entities (Organisation, Place, Product) detected via Google's Natural Language API or SpaCy.
3. Mapping Search intent (Know, Do, Website, Visit-In-Person.
4. Associate each cluster with a range of semi-optimised anchors, incorporating both entity and lexical variation.
5. Define exposure thresholds for the netlinking phase (exact number of anchors per referring domain).
The semantic approach vs. simple density
A keyword is not just a string of characters: it is an entity linked to sub-concepts. In practice, we calculate a CoSim (Cosine Similarity) score between the suggested anchor and the vector sum of the target content (Word2Vec or Word Embeddings BERT). If the score exceeds a threshold of 0.7, the anchor is semantically redundant; a more peripheral alternative is then chosen to enrich the lexical field without repetition.
TF-IDF, FastText, and the "Triple C" effect
The integration of varied anchors contributes to what is known as the "Triple C" effect: Coherence, Complementarity, Contextualisation. TF-IDF acts as a safeguard to identify terms that are under-represented in the site's overall corpus. Thanks to its sub-words, FastText can automatically generate long tail anchors that are not very competitive but are highly correlated thematically (e.g. "anti-noise headphones for drills derived from "anti-noise headphones for drills").
Tools for managing and auditing your anchors
The software landscape has become richer since Penguin: Ahrefs, Majestic and SEMrush now display an "Anchor Cloud" report. At Ahrefs, the donut diagram segments by type (exact/partial). A "words" filter analyses the average anchor length; an unusual peak at three words may signal a clumsily-written sponsored article campaign. Google Search Console, under "Links > Referring sites", does not provide all the anchors, but it can be used to detect a negative SEO attack when "casino online" or "viagra generico" suddenly appear. Finally, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, coupled with an export from Majestic, allows an outgoing link/incoming link cross-reference; the objective: to check the semantic consistency between the incoming anchor and the surrounding paragraph text.
Case study: the 2012 Penguin sanction and the Interflora study
On 24 April 2012, Google rolled out the Penguin 1.0 update: a number of sites, including a network of British travel agencies, lost up to 60 % of traffic. Webtrends logs from the time show that the ratio of exact "cheap flights" anchors exceeded 56 % of the profile, while the sector benchmark was 7 %. In 2013, Interflora (UK) was dereferenced ten days after Valentine's Day; the press revealed the existence of more than 150 sponsored posts on regional blogs, each using the "Interflora flowers" anchor. After an express disavowal and rewriting of the anchors, visibility was restored. These cases illustrate that a link that is supposed to increase relevance can become toxic if the anchor text lacks diversity. Post-mortem audits concluded that a simple "brand + naked URL" distribution at 70 % would probably have been enough to avoid the penalty.
Cross-channel impact: integrating link anchors with UX strategy and CRO
Too many SEO teams ignore the contribution of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) in the selection of internal anchors. But an internal anchor is not just an algorithmic signal: it's a micro-interaction that guides the user. A study carried out by Baymard Institute showed that replacing the generic anchor "find out more" with a benefit-oriented formulation ("watch the 3-minute video tutorials") increased the click-through rate by 12 %. In SEO terms, this behavioural improvement (less pogo-sticking) also sends positive engagement signals to the RankBrain algorithm. Similarly, on mobile, CTA anchors that are too long can cause the "bottleneck effect": they monopolise screen space and reduce legibility. Hence the importance of A/B tests (Google Optimize or Optimizely) to harmonise semantic relevance and UX performance.
Best practices for anchoring in a mobile-first ecosystem
Mobile-first indexing has overturned certain rules. On a 360 px wide screen, four or five words are enough before forcing a line break. So, while on the desktop you can afford "complete guide to cash management for SMEs", on mobile you can opt for "guide to cash management for SMEs". This conciseness requires tokens to be prioritised: key entities are kept, stop words are removed. In addition, anchors must comply with accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1): avoid "click here" (non-descript), add a visible focus for keyboard navigation. The Core Web Vitals algorithm incorporates CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift); a stylised link via font-weight but without available space can generate a shift when lazy-loading the font, impacting both UX and SEO.
The future of anchors: Passage Ranking, NLP and entities
The roll-out of Passage Ranking (2021) and MUM (Multitask Unified Model, 2022) heralds a change in the role of anchors. Google no longer needs the anchor to understand the context of a paragraph; it can extract relevance at sentence level. Nevertheless, the anchor remains an explicit tag that guides the algorithm in indexing entities. In the short term, extended anchors ("how to repair a dishwasher" instead of "repair a dishwasher") could benefit from passage ranking, as they precisely match the intention. In the longer term, we could imagine a hybrid weighting: 50 % recognised entity (via Freebase/Wikidata), 50 % behavioural feedback (time spent post-click). Anchors should therefore be aligned with the "Entity SEO" strategy: names of artists, patents, trends (NFT, Web3) rather than simple keywords.
Operational checklist for choosing and monitoring anchors
1. Collect existing anchor texts with Ahrefs and consolidate them in Google Sheets.
2. Standardise (lower case, remove punctuation) and label according to typology.
3. Calculate the ratio of exact anchors per priority keyword and compare it to the sector median.
4. Define anchor quotas per campaign: maximum 20 % exact, 30 % partial, 30 % brand, 20 % URL/CTA (to be adjusted to the sector).
5. For each new page, generate three anchor variations: short, medium and long tail.
6. Set up monthly monitoring via the Ahrefs API to detect fluctuations of 5 % or more.
7. Audit internal anchors with Screaming Frog + Visual Crawl Map to remove unnecessary duplicates.
8. Run an A/B test on the main CTA anchors to validate the UX/SEO benefit.
9. Update the disavow file every quarter if toxic anchors appear.
10. Synchronise the anchor nomenclature with the Knowledge Graph database (via Schema.org/Thing) for strategic entities.
Pragmatic conclusion
Optimising link anchors is no longer the art of stuffing exact text into each partner URL; it's the architecture of a linguistic graph that reflects the richness of your semantic universe while respecting the user experience. By combining statistical analysis, understanding of entities and UX thinking, you can align your anchors with current and future algorithmic relevance criteria. The historical examples of Interflora and travel agencies are a reminder that a poorly chosen anchor can cost millions in lost traffic, whereas an anchor designed as a knowledge bridge offers a sustainable competitive advantage. Adopt anchor governance based on data, diversity and context quality, and your SERP visibility will improve, and so will your users.
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To find out more
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2. https://optimiz.me/choisir-ses-mots-cles/
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4. https://webissime.fr/seo-comment-optimiser-les-ancres-de-liens/
5. https://fr.oncrawl.com/seo-technique/ancres-de-liens-impact-seo/
6. https://www.anthedesign.fr/webmarketing/optimisation-ancres-de-liens/
7. https://www.powertrafic.fr/choisir-les-bons-mots-cles-referencement/
8. https://www.seo.fr/glossaire/optimisation-des-anchors-texts
9. https://www.seo-genie.fr/2018/02/16/optimiser-ancres-de-liens-seo/
10. https://editoile.fr/faq/qu-est-ce-que-le-seo/optimize-anchor-text-link-juice/
