Anchor text distribution is the mix of wording used across all the links that point to a website or a page. It shows how often other sites link using your business name, your web address, generic words such as “website”, or the keywords you want to rank for. Search engines and SEO practitioners read that mix as a clue to whether the links were earned naturally or arranged.
How anchor text distribution works
Every backlink has anchor text, the clickable words. Backlink tools group these into types and show them as a share of the total: branded anchors such as “Smith & Daughters Joinery”, naked URLs such as “smithjoinery.co.uk”, generic anchors such as “here”, partial-match anchors that include the keyword within a phrase, and exact-match anchors that repeat the target keyword alone.
When people link of their own accord, they mostly use a business name, a URL or whatever words fit their sentence. A profile in which a large share of links say “bespoke kitchens Manchester” is unlikely to have happened without someone arranging it. Google’s Penguin system, introduced in 2012 and part of the core ranking systems since 2016, was built to discount links like these. Google now says it mainly ignores manipulative links rather than demoting the site, though large-scale schemes can still attract a manual action.
Why it matters
For a UK business, the distribution is a health check on how your links were built. If a previous agency bought guest posts or directory listings with keyword anchors, the distribution usually shows it. Those links may now pass little or no value, which explains why a page with plenty of links still struggles.
It also guides future work. Digital PR, local sponsorships and supplier links tend to produce branded anchors, which is exactly what a natural link profile looks like. Relevance then comes from the topic of the linking page and the words around the link, not from forcing the keyword into the anchor.
There is no correct percentage. Some tools and blogs publish “ideal” ratios, but these are rules of thumb drawn from samples of ranking sites, not figures from Google. The mix varies by sector and by how well known a brand is: a long-established local firm will naturally have more branded anchors than a new comparison site.
Common mistakes
- Treating a published ratio as a target and building links to fill the gaps.
- Asking every guest post, directory or partner to use the same commercial keyword.
- Over-correcting by disavowing every exact-match link, including genuine editorial ones.
- Reading the distribution for the whole domain while ignoring that one service page receives nearly all the keyword anchors.
- Worrying about spammy anchors from scraper sites you never dealt with, which Google generally ignores.
How to act on it
Export the anchor report from a backlink tool and sort anchors into the types above, both for the domain and for your most important pages. Then look at the same report for three or four competitors that rank well for your main terms. You are looking for anything unusual: a single commercial phrase that dominates, or a sudden spike in one anchor over a few months.
If the pattern points to past paid links, list the linking sites, judge whether they are genuine, and decide whether removal or a disavow file is warranted. Then shift future effort towards links people give willingly. That is how I approach link building for UK businesses: earned mentions on relevant sites, with the anchor left to the person writing the page.