Google does not publish a safe share of exact-match anchors. Not 5 percent, not 20, not 40. In the pages we read on 27 October 2026, Google describes good anchor text for the links you write, and lists "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites" as one example of link spam. Every percentage you see beyond that comes from SEOs or tool vendors, and they disagree.
What an anchor is
Google's page on links, titled "Link best practices for Google" and last updated 10 December 2025, defines it plainly: "Anchor text (also known as link text) is the visible text of a link." For an image link, Google uses the image's alt text as the anchor.
The same page says what good looks like: "Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to."
Natural anchors and over-optimized anchors: one example
Take an invented page. Hearth & Rye is a fictional bakery with a sourdough guide. This is an example, not a SerpYard customer. Here is how different links to that guide might read, and whether Google's spam policies (last updated 28 August 2026) describe them.
| Anchor text | Where it sits | Kind | Listed in the spam policy? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hearth & Rye | A food blog's weekly roundup | Brand name | Not listed |
| hearthrye.example/sourdough-guide | A local news story | Bare URL | Not listed |
| how to feed a sourdough starter | A reader's own answer on a cooking forum | Descriptive phrase | Not listed |
| this guide | A friend's newsletter | Generic | Not listed |
| best sourdough starter kit | The same phrase in ten guest posts and three press releases | Repeated exact-match commercial phrase | Matches a listed example (optimized anchors on other sites) |
| best sourdough starter kit | A forum signature | Same phrase | Matches a listed example (optimized anchors on other sites) |
The policy lists "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites" and "Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature" as link spam. It defines link spam as links made "primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings."
Not listed does not mean Google endorses them: the policy defines link spam by purpose, so any link made primarily to manipulate rankings can count. Two more cautions. The optimized-anchor example sits inside a bullet that opens with paid advertorials, so we read it as an example, not a ban on every keyword anchor in a guest post. And the policy's own examples show several different keyword links in one passage, and say nothing about a count or about who placed the link. One phrase repeated across many sites is our illustration of the same category, not the policy's wording.
Google says it finds such practices "through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action," and that violating sites "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all." Google says buying and selling links for advertising and sponsorship is not a violation as long as the links are qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored"; our post on whether nofollow links help SEO covers what those labels do.
Internal anchors and external anchors
Google's anchor advice is aimed at links you write. The links page says: "If it feels like you're forcing keywords into the anchor text, then it's probably too much." On your own site you choose every anchor, so that test is yours to apply.
Links from other sites are different. In an article dated 8 March 2021, Search Engine Journal transcribed a video in which John Mueller of Google said that for links from other people's sites, "usually that's something you wouldn't have control over anyway." That is a secondhand transcript of a video we did not watch, and Mueller did not give a mix of anchor types.
Plato framed the question in the Cratylus. In Benjamin Jowett's translation, Hermogenes argues that "there is no name given to anything by nature; all is convention and habit of the users." Cratylus holds the opposite, and Socrates does not simply side with either. An anchor is the name a link gives a page. On your pages the name is your choice. Elsewhere, other people choose it, and they are the ones the spam policy is watching.
What a link's source adds is a separate question; see our post on whether .edu backlinks carry more weight.
What no one can tell you
Google gives no ratio. Google's links page, the Starter Guide and the policy contain no percentage, and we found no Google statement with one. We cannot prove none exists.
Vendors fill the gap, and they differ. An Ahrefs guide says that "Most SEOs now seem to recommend" exact-match anchors "sparingly", "usually between ~1% and 5%." Its one example is a screenshot from an unnamed SEO blog that reads "Less Than 1%." A Metricswatch checklist dated 9 February 2025 says to keep exact-match anchors under 20 percent, lists exact and partial match together at 25 to 35 percent, and says sites above 40 percent often face penalties. Neither cites Google.
Ahrefs also ran a study, written in 2019 and updated in April 2020. It looked at the top 20 results for 19,840 keywords, 384,614 pages. The correlation between rank and exact-match share averaged 0.1436, which Ahrefs calls "relatively weak." It could not know each page's target keyword, and correlation is not cause. Its own advice: "Don't try to manipulate your anchor text ratios at all."
Then the patent. US 7,346,839, whose inception-date section our domain age post covers, was filed in 2003 and is now shown as expired. It says synthetic link graphs are likely to show "relatively spiky" growth in anchor words, and that the search engine "may cap the impact of suspect anchors." It gives two reasons for such spikiness: "a large number of identical anchors" or "deliberately different anchors from a lot of documents." No percentage appears, and a patent shows what Google considered, not what it runs. The text does not treat varied anchors as automatically safe either, so "just vary them" is not a rule you can take from it. How fast links arrive is a separate question, covered in our post on whether you can build backlinks too fast.
On the enforcement side, Google's December 2022 link spam update said ranking "may change as spammy links are neutralized and any credit passed by these unnatural links are lost." That post never mentions anchor text, and neither does Google's April 2012 post "Another step to reward high-quality sites," the one SEOs call the Penguin announcement (it does not use that name). The tie between Penguin and anchors comes from the SEO industry, not from those posts.
Checklist
- On your own site, write anchors that describe the page. If a phrase feels forced, shorten it.
- Do not use one commercial phrase across guest posts, press releases or signatures you arranged.
- Mark paid links
sponsoredornofollow. - Treat any percentage, including the ones above, as an SEO or vendor opinion. Do not aim for a "safe" number.
- Worried about old links? Read whether you should disavow first.
Choosing a domain? You can browse the listings and check its history before anything else.
Frequently asked questions
How many exact-match anchors is too many?
Google does not say. Its spam policy describes the pattern of optimized anchors placed on other sites for ranking, not a count. Any number you read is an SEO's or vendor's estimate.