Search almost any anchor text guide and you'll find a formula: something like 30–40% branded, 5% exact match, and the rest split across partial match, naked URLs and generic phrases. It is presented as settled science. It isn't. It is a rough pattern that happens to describe many naturally built profiles, mistaken for a rule you should engineer towards.
The five anchor types
- Branded: your brand or site name (e.g. "GuestPostsManager"). Usually the largest natural category, since it is how people instinctively refer to a brand.
- Exact match: the exact keyword you are targeting (e.g. "link building agency"). Strong for relevance, but the anchor type most associated with manipulation when overused.
- Partial match: a variation that includes the keyword within a longer phrase (e.g. "a solid link building agency like this one").
- Naked URL: the raw URL used as the anchor text, common in citations and forum-style references.
- Generic: phrases such as "click here" or "read more" that carry no keyword signal at all.
Why a fixed ratio is the wrong frame
A percentage target treats anchor text as something to engineer towards a number, which is backwards. Anchor text is a by-product of how content naturally refers to something. The right mix for a five-year-old site with an established brand and thousands of organic mentions looks nothing like the right mix for a new site building its first fifty links, and neither looks like the right mix for a site recovering from an over-optimised profile. Applying the same 30/40/5 formula to all three is the kind of false precision that makes a tidy blog post and a poor real-world decision.
Diagnose before you decide
Before adding new links, look at what you already have. Pull your current backlink profile and sort the existing anchors into the five types above. If the profile is already heavily concentrated in one type, especially exact match, that is what new anchors should correct, not a fixed target percentage. If you are building from close to zero you have more flexibility, but "mostly branded and natural phrases, exact match sparingly" is a reasonable default rather than a strict rule.
A real example: recovering from a toxic profile
In the crypto affiliate case study, the starting anchor profile was already over-concentrated in exact-match anchors from earlier link building, a pattern search engines are more likely to treat as manipulative the more consistently it repeats. The right call was not a generic "safe" ratio. It was a deliberately conservative mix weighted towards branded and natural phrases to dilute that concentration. A brand-new site with no link history would not need the same caution, which is the point: the diagnosis drove the decision, not a formula.
A practical framework
- Audit your current anchor distribution before adding anything new.
- If one type (usually exact match) is already over-represented, weight new links away from it, not toward a textbook percentage.
- If you are starting fresh, lean towards branded and natural phrasing, and use exact match only where it reads naturally in context, never as a quota.
- Revisit the audit periodically as new links land, rather than setting a target once and ignoring it.
This is part of the same reporting discipline covered in the main link building guide. Knowing your anchor mix means tracking the anchor text used on every live placement, not estimating it afterwards. It is also why anchor strategy is handled as part ofeditorial link building as a whole, not treated as a separate add-on decided after placements go live.