Does anchor text still matter?

Way back in Nov 2017, an Ahrefs’ official asked Google’s John Muller on his Twitter feed whether anchor text was important for search engines when considering internal links. He replied, “Most links do provide a bit of additional context through their anchor text…”

Anchor text’s importance hasn’t waned over the years. As search crawlers become better in understanding your content, relevant anchor text has become essential for higher rankings as it signals to Google which keywords your page should be ranking for.

Our friends at Hubspot state that optimizing the anchor text may sound trivial at first, but if done right it can definitely boost your rankings. Similarly, Moz confirms that SEO-friendly anchor text is one that is succinct and related to the target page to which it’s linked.

So anchor text clearly still matters in 2019. Here are a few quick guidelines to help you with optimizing your anchor text:

• Keep your anchor text relevant to the link
• Utilize low keyword density
• Use an appropriate mix of branded, exact match and generic keywords.