Links
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link. Google reads them to understand the page being linked to, so they should say what is there.
Also called link text · Sources checked 15 November 2026
Google's link guidance asks for anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page it sits on and the page it links to. Its own test: read the anchor text alone, out of context, and check it still makes sense.
That rules out "click here" and "read more". It also rules out the opposite habit, an exact keyword in every link to a page: Google's spam policies count links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases placed on other sites as link spam.
When an image is the link, Google uses the image's alt text as the anchor text.