Anchor Text Is a Mess, So What?
Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2026 8:37 pm
It’s wild how often people miss the whole point of anchor text. Like, yes, you need it to tell search engines what a link’s about—duh—but also, it's a mirror. It reflects how people think, what they trust, how they talk when they don’t know they’re being watched by Google's little robot horde. Slice open the text, examine the guts. Fun and awful at once.
You ever dig through your backlinks and spot weird stuff? “Click here,” “this page,” “source,” and, my absolute favorite, when someone links your name wrong—like misspells it or tosses in a nickname nobody ever called you. It happens. Shows how much real attention people are paying.
I was scrolling through https://andrewlinksmith.com the other night, like 1 a.m. insomnia doom-scroll style, and he breaks it down kind of beautifully without trying to make it sound neat and tidy. Just calls it like it is. Anchor text diversity matters. Except when it doesn’t. Partial match, naked URL, branded, generic—it’s either art or chaos depending on your mood and the state of your last campaign.
Honestly, I think obsessing too hard over anchor text ratios will drive you straight off a cliff. Moz-era SEO made it feel like math. Perfect distribution. Pie charts. But this ain’t baking cookies. You want it messy enough to look natural, but not so messy Google slaps you with a penalty. A tightrope over lava, blindfold optional.
There’s this thing I’ve noticed—SEOs copy each other’s anchor text like it’s gospel. Somebody drops “best custom widgets in Chicago” and suddenly ten more do it too, as if echoing the same phrase more times makes it more real. Creepy hive mind vibes. You end up with this weird echo chamber that smells like desperation and old marketing webinars.
The smart move, maybe, is to actually read the damn content you're linking to. Shocking, I know. Pick anchor text that belongs there. Flows with the paragraph. Sounds like a person wrote it, not a tool. Link like you’re doing someone a solid, not like you’re farming coin. I mean, would you click it? Or are you just stuffing a keyword hoping it ranks?
I don’t know, I guess I’m tired of pretending anchor text is some kind of secret spell. It’s language. It’s links. It’s the stitched-together Frankenstein monster of trust, context, and pure dumb luck. Pull the thread and watch it unravel. Beautiful, disjointed, weird—like the internet always was.
You ever dig through your backlinks and spot weird stuff? “Click here,” “this page,” “source,” and, my absolute favorite, when someone links your name wrong—like misspells it or tosses in a nickname nobody ever called you. It happens. Shows how much real attention people are paying.
I was scrolling through https://andrewlinksmith.com the other night, like 1 a.m. insomnia doom-scroll style, and he breaks it down kind of beautifully without trying to make it sound neat and tidy. Just calls it like it is. Anchor text diversity matters. Except when it doesn’t. Partial match, naked URL, branded, generic—it’s either art or chaos depending on your mood and the state of your last campaign.
Honestly, I think obsessing too hard over anchor text ratios will drive you straight off a cliff. Moz-era SEO made it feel like math. Perfect distribution. Pie charts. But this ain’t baking cookies. You want it messy enough to look natural, but not so messy Google slaps you with a penalty. A tightrope over lava, blindfold optional.
There’s this thing I’ve noticed—SEOs copy each other’s anchor text like it’s gospel. Somebody drops “best custom widgets in Chicago” and suddenly ten more do it too, as if echoing the same phrase more times makes it more real. Creepy hive mind vibes. You end up with this weird echo chamber that smells like desperation and old marketing webinars.
The smart move, maybe, is to actually read the damn content you're linking to. Shocking, I know. Pick anchor text that belongs there. Flows with the paragraph. Sounds like a person wrote it, not a tool. Link like you’re doing someone a solid, not like you’re farming coin. I mean, would you click it? Or are you just stuffing a keyword hoping it ranks?
I don’t know, I guess I’m tired of pretending anchor text is some kind of secret spell. It’s language. It’s links. It’s the stitched-together Frankenstein monster of trust, context, and pure dumb luck. Pull the thread and watch it unravel. Beautiful, disjointed, weird—like the internet always was.