Link Building in 2026: What Works and What to Avoid
Link building in 2026: which links matter, which strategies hold up, how to use advertorials honestly (rel=sponsored) and the traps that risk penalties.
Key takeaways
- Anchor text is the clickable text of a link; Google uses it as a hint about what a user will find on the target page.
- In a natural profile, brand names, bare URLs and descriptive phrases dominate; exact-match commercial anchors are a small minority.
- There is no official "safe" percentage. The overall pattern, the pace of new links and the relevance of the linking pages matter more.
- You can see the most common anchors pointing to your site in the Links report of Google Search Console and export them.
- Paid links should be qualified, ideally with rel="sponsored"; a paid article with an optimized anchor and no qualification can break Google's spam policies.
Contents
- What is anchor text and why do search engines read it?
- The types of anchor text, with examples
- What does a natural anchor distribution look like?
- How to audit your anchor text profile in Search Console
- Paid links and anchors: what Google says
- Internal anchor text: the part you fully control
- Common anchor text mistakes
- When these rules do not apply or have limits
- Next steps
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link, the exact words a reader sees and clicks. A natural link profile uses varied anchors: mostly your brand name, your web address and descriptive phrases, with exact-match commercial phrases appearing only occasionally. Google publishes no official percentage, so what matters is the overall pattern rather than any single link.
What is anchor text and why do search engines read it?
In HTML, the anchor is whatever sits between the <a> and </a> tags. To a visitor it is the blue or underlined text. To Google it is a hint: if ten different pages link to the same address using similar words, the algorithms get a signal about the topic of the target page.
Google's documentation on links asks for link text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant both to the page it sits on and to the page it points to. One handy test from that documentation: read the anchor on its own, pulled out of the sentence. If you still understand what you will get after the click, the anchor works.
Anchors never work alone. Google also weighs the surrounding sentence, the paragraph, the topic of the article and the quality of the site that links. That is why two links with identical anchors can have very different effects depending on the page they appear on.
If you are new to the subject, our guide to link building in 2026 explains what makes a link valuable overall. This article covers only anchors and the pattern they form. Anchors become delicate mostly in paid placements, which we cover in the page about advertorial SEO on Romanian publications.
The types of anchor text, with examples
SEO practitioners use more or less the same classification. The examples below use a fictional dental clinic in Bucharest, "Example Dental Clinic," with a page at example-dental.ro/dental-implants.
| Anchor type | Example | Role in the profile |
|---|---|---|
| Branded | Example Dental Clinic | The foundation of a natural profile; people mention you by name |
| Naked URL | example-dental.ro | Very common in citations, press mentions and resource lists |
| Exact match | dental implants Bucharest | Powerful, but risky if it dominates |
| Partial match | treatment with a dental implant | A more natural variant of the target phrase |
| Descriptive / sentence | a guide to what an implant involves | Typical of freely written editorial articles |
| Brand + keyword | Example Dental – implants | An acceptable compromise if not repeated mechanically |
| Generic | here, their website, source | Normal in small quantities |
| Image | the alt text of a linked image | Acts as the anchor for image links |
Exact-match anchors are not forbidden. The trouble starts when they become the rule instead of the exception. A real recommendation, written by a person talking about you, rarely looks identical ten times in a row.
What does a natural anchor distribution look like?
There is no percentage table validated by Google. The figures that circulate in industry articles are estimates from tool vendors, not rules, so we do not treat them as such. What we can say with reasonable confidence:
- branded and URL anchors are usually the most numerous, because that is how people who do not think about SEO cite you;
- descriptive and partial anchors come next, in large numbers but with a lot of variety;
- exact-match anchors are a minority and rarely repeat word for word;
- generic anchors show up occasionally.
Picture two illustrative, fictional profiles.
| Aspect | Profile that looks organic | Profile that looks built |
|---|---|---|
| Most frequent anchor | The brand name | The same commercial phrase |
| Variety | Dozens of different wordings | A handful of repeated wordings |
| Target pages | Homepage, guides, service pages | Almost everything to one page |
| Pace | Irregular, with spontaneous mentions | Bursts followed by silence |
| Sources | Topical and diverse | Unrelated sites |
The difference is not a mathematical rule but an overall impression. If a person opening your anchor list can tell at once which phrase "is being sold," algorithms may well notice it too.
Qualification matters as much as the anchor. Google's spam policies treat paid articles with ranking-credit links or optimized anchors as spam unless the links are qualified with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". More on that in the section on paid links below.
How to audit your anchor text profile in Search Console
You do not need a paid tool to get a first picture. Google Search Console has a free report, and our beginner's guide to Google Search Console covers the other reports too.
- Open your site's property in Search Console and go to the Links report.
- In the external links section, find the list called "Top linking text."
- Export the data to a spreadsheet. The report shows a sample, not a complete inventory of every link.
- Group the anchors into categories: brand, URL, exact match, partial, descriptive, generic.
- Compare the categories with the table above and ask yourself: if I read this list without knowing the company, what would it tell me?
- Also check "Top linking sites" to see whether aggressive anchors come from one place.
Reading an example (fictional data)
Suppose the export for a fictional site looks like this:
| Anchor | Number of links | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Example Dental Clinic | 31 | Brand |
| example-dental.ro | 18 | URL |
| dental implants Bucharest | 14 | Exact match |
| their guide to implants | 9 | Descriptive |
| here | 6 | Generic |
Out of 78 links, about two fifths are branded, and the exact commercial anchor ranks third. That is not an alarm bell, but it is worth finding out where those 14 links appeared. If they sit in different editorial articles, the pattern is plausible. If they all appeared in the same week on sites unrelated to dentistry, you probably have an old campaign to investigate. The example shows the logic, not a threshold: the same numbers can be healthy in one case and a problem in another.
If the file shows dozens of links with the same phrase on irrelevant sites, do not panic and start deleting. First find the origin: an old campaign, a vendor, a network of directories. Only then decide. For what to do (and not do) with problematic links, see our guide to toxic backlinks and the disavow file.
Paid links and anchors: what Google says
Google's spam documentation defines buying or selling links for ranking purposes as spam, including exchanging money, goods or services for links. Among its examples are advertorials and native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links passing ranking credit, and links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed on other sites.
The key word in that rule is "qualified." The same documentation states that such links do not violate the policies when marked with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". Here is what a correctly marked paid mention looks like:
<a href="https://example-dental.ro/dental-implants" rel="sponsored">
Example Dental Clinic
</a>What that means for your anchors:
- in a paid article, a branded anchor with
rel="sponsored"is the safe and honest choice; - an exact-match anchor in an unmarked advertorial is exactly the scenario described as spam;
- a properly marked brand mention keeps its value as visibility: readers see your name, can click, and referral traffic shows up in analytics.
If you use advertorials, treat them as visibility and brand-mention tools, not as a guaranteed ranking lever. For the differences between formats, read our comparison of press releases and advertorials.
Internal anchor text: the part you fully control
Unlike links you earn from others, internal anchors are written by you. The same principles apply, and the temptation to repeat a commercial phrase is even stronger. A few useful rules:
- use descriptive anchors that tell people what the target page covers;
- vary the wording naturally, depending on the sentence;
- never send two different pages to the same anchor, because you put them in competition; see our article on keyword cannibalization;
- avoid "read more" as the only anchor across dozens of cards and menus.
For the full picture, see the guide to internal linking and site architecture. Internal anchors are the safest lever you have, precisely because they depend on nobody else.
Common anchor text mistakes
- The same phrase in every campaign. Ten links repeating one commercial phrase reveal the purpose.
- Anchors only to the services page. A natural profile spreads links across the homepage, guides, studies and product pages.
- Long, headline-style anchors. Google recommends concise anchors; a whole sentence as link text is rarely useful.
- Linked images with no alt text. You lose the only textual hint for the link.
- Mass anchor rewrites. Asking for 40 anchors to be rewritten in a single week creates another artificial pattern.
- Fixating on one metric. The anchor is one signal among many: source relevance, context, position on the page and site quality.
When these rules do not apply or have limits
Not every profile should look the same. A few situations change the reasoning:
- A very new site with few links. With five links in total, percentages mean nothing; what matters is that each one is honest and relevant.
- Generic brand names. If the company is called "Auto Services Ltd," a branded anchor looks like an exact match. Variety must come from the URL, the founder's name or descriptive wording.
- Spontaneous editorial links. When a journalist cites you, you do not pick the anchor. That is what makes those links valuable, so do not "fix" them without reason.
- Incomplete data. Search Console shows a sample, and third-party tools have different indexes. Draw conclusions from trends, not from exact figures.
- No guarantee of rankings. A clean anchor profile does not guarantee results; it only lowers risk and protects credibility.
Next steps
- Export your anchors from Search Console and sort them into the eight categories in the table.
- Identify the page or campaign that produced any repetitive anchors.
- For future paid links, ask for correct qualification and for branded or descriptive anchors.
- Review the internal anchors of your most important pages and remove repetition.
- Track the trend monthly, not just the number of links. A monthly SEO KPI report helps you keep records without drowning in detail.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your profile, the team behind our advertorial SEO service can review your anchors and suggest a realistic plan, with no promises about positions. The right anchor is the one a reader would have written anyway, even if Google did not exist.