Anchor Text Distribution Checker

Classify your backlink anchors into branded, exact, partial, generic and naked URL buckets and spot over-optimisation. Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored.

Why anchor ratios decide campaign safety

Anchor text is one of the strongest relevance signals you can influence — and the easiest to overdo. Profiles that get filtered almost always share one trait: too many exact-match commercial anchors pointing at the same page in a short window. Export your anchors from any backlink tool, paste them here, and see the split before it becomes a problem.

A distribution that holds up

• Branded — 40–55%. The dominant bucket in every natural profile.
• Partial match — 20–30%. Keyword plus context, the workhorse of a campaign.
• Exact match — under 10–15%, reserved for your best placements.
• Generic — 10–15%. “Read more”, “this guide” — real editors write these.
• Naked URL — 5–15%. Common in citations and forum references.

Read it per page, not per domain

Sitewide averages hide the risk. A homepage with hundreds of branded links can mask a service page whose only twelve links are all exact match. Always segment by target URL, which is how we plan anchors on every campaign.

Fixing a skewed profile

You rarely need removals. Dilute instead: build branded and generic anchors, vary the surrounding sentence, spread placements over months, and route new links to supporting content that internally links to the money page. If anchors were bought exact-match at scale, disavow only genuinely toxic sources — and get a plan from our link building team before touching anything.