Definition
The clickable words of a link. Its wording tells search engines what the target page is about; over-optimised anchors are a classic penalty trigger.
Anchor text is the only part of a link a reader actually sees, which is why it carries weight in both directions. It describes the destination to a person deciding whether to click, and to a crawler deciding what the destination is about. The two audiences want the same thing — an honest description — and conflict only when someone writes for the crawler alone.
How it works
Search engines associate the words in and around a link with the page it points to. A link reading “withdrawal times at licensed sportsbooks” tells them more about the target than one reading “click here”, and a paragraph of relevant text around it narrows the meaning further.
That association is why anchors became a target for manipulation, and why the pattern across a whole profile matters more than any single link. Editors write naturally: brand names, bare URLs, half-sentences, “this guide”, the occasional exact phrase. A profile where a third of all links use the same commercial phrase did not arise from editors.
Why it matters in iGaming
Commercial anchors in this sector are blunt — the money phrases are short, high-value and heavily contested, so the temptation to use them everywhere is stronger than in most markets. That makes the resulting distribution easy to spot.
Anchor patterns are also the signal that survives a site rebuild. Pages can be rewritten and redirected, but the words other people used to link to them stay as they were, and a profile built on repeated exact matches keeps looking manipulated long after the pages it points to have changed.
Example
A review site earns forty links over a year. Twenty-two use the brand name, nine are bare URLs or “read more”, six are descriptive half-sentences, and three use a commercial phrase. That shape is unremarkable, which is the point. The same forty links with thirty commercial anchors describe a different site to a search engine — one that bought its links.
Common mistakes
- Setting an anchor-text ratio as a target. The distribution is a symptom of how links were earned, not a dial to set; hitting a “natural-looking” quota deliberately produces the same uniformity it was meant to avoid.
- Using the money phrase on the strongest placements. The best links are the ones most likely to be examined by a human reviewer, which is the worst place for a transparently optimised anchor.
- Writing anchors nobody would click. If the wording only makes sense as a ranking signal, the link is doing one job instead of two, and the publisher usually notices before the search engine does.