An anchor text plan is a table of link texts (anchors) prepared in advance, mapped to the pages you are promoting, with set ratios by anchor type. To build one, you collect target keywords, split them by anchor type, set a safe share for each type, and map the anchors to specific URLs. Below: a step-by-step guide with a real example and a ready-to-use template.
Key points in 30 seconds
- An anchor text plan defines in advance what text future links will use and which page they will point to.
- Workflow: collect keywords → split by type → set ratios → map to URLs → check for over-optimization.
- Exact-match commercial anchors should be the smallest group: about 1–5%, otherwise the penalty risk grows.
- Each anchor is mapped to a single target page to avoid keyword cannibalization.
- A ready-made Excel template keeps ratios under control and saves time.
What an anchor text plan is and why you need one
Anchor text is the visible text a link is placed on. An anchor text plan collects all planned anchors in one document, with the type, target page, and placement site. Without it, buying links is like renovating without a budget. Fun at first, then chaos: it is easy to skew the profile toward commercial anchors and get hit with a penalty. We covered link texts themselves in detail in the article what is anchor text; this one is about planning the set.
An anchor text plan solves three problems: it keeps anchor type ratios safe, distributes link equity across the right pages, and gives the contractor a clear brief on what goes where.
There is a fourth one people often forget: protection from other people’s briefs. When anchors are invented by a marketplace copywriter or a contractor, they almost always use the main keyword because “it works better.” Flawless logic, right up until the penalty. Yet Google’s spam policies explicitly list large-scale guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links as an example of link spam. An anchor text plan makes you, not the contractor, the author of your profile.
Step 1. Collect keywords and semantics
Start with the semantics of the pages you are promoting. Export the keywords each page already ranks for or should rank for: from Search Console, Keyword Planner, and competitor research tools. Group them by landing page: one query cluster equals one target.
At the same step, pick out brand variations (company name, domain, spelling variants) and generic phrases (“here,” “on this site,” “learn more”); you will need them for dilution. The output of this step is a list of keywords mapped to URLs, which you then turn into anchors.
Where to find keywords for anchors
- Search Console → Performance. Queries a page already gets impressions for but sits at positions 8–20 are the best candidates for partial-match anchors.
- Keyword research. If you already have a clustered keyword set, take clusters from it; if not, start with our guide to keyword research and semantic core building.
- Competitor anchors. Anchor reports in Ahrefs or Semrush show which words people use when linking to niche leaders. They are both a source of ideas and a benchmark for ratios; see our guide to competitor backlink analysis for details.
- Customer language. Questions from reviews, support chats, and forums give you natural phrasing: “where to get a painless teeth cleaning” sounds far more alive than “professional oral hygiene.”
Step 2. Split keywords by anchor type
Every anchor belongs to one of the types. How they are mixed determines how natural the profile looks. The classification below matches the one used in the anchor text guides by Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush.
| Anchor type | Example | Role |
| Branded | “Links Buy”, “linksbuy” | Foundation of a natural profile |
| Non-keyword / URL | “linksbuy.io”, “here”, “via this link” | Mimics organic citations |
| Generic (natural) | “read more”, “source” | Dilutes commercial anchors |
| Partial-match | “where to order crowd links” | Soft keyword usage |
| Exact-match commercial | “buy crowd links” | Direct signal, but risky |
More anchor examples for each type are in a separate article, what is anchor text. Also keep in mind Google’s link best practices: anchor text should be descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page it points to. That makes a good filter for every row in your plan: if a phrase reads like a search query rather than part of a sentence, rewrite it.
Step 3. Set safe ratios
There is no single “normal percentage of keyword anchors”: the shares depend on the niche, the age of the site, and competitors’ profiles. But there is a safe benchmark that is easy to start from:
| Anchor type | Approximate share |
| Branded | 30–40% |
| Non-keyword and URL | 20–30% |
| Generic / natural | 15–25% |
| Partial-match | 10–15% |
| Exact-match commercial | 1–5% |
The key rule: keep exact-match commercial anchors to a minimum. Too many of them is the most common cause of penalties. Before you lock in the shares, look at the profiles of two or three top-ranking competitors and compare your ratios with their real numbers. That is more reliable than any universal table.
How to adjust ratios for niche and site age
The baseline table is for an “average” commercial site. In practice, we shift the shares depending on the situation. The values below are our working benchmarks, not a Google rule; the final word always belongs to the median of the sites ranking in your top results.
| Situation | Brand + URL | Generic | Partial-match | Exact-match |
| New site (under 6 months, up to ~30 referring domains) | 65–75% | 20–25% | 5–10% | 0% |
| Mature site, regular niche | 50–60% | 15–25% | 15–20% | up to 5% |
| Highly competitive commercial niche (loans, betting, legal) | 55–65% | 15–20% | 15–20% | up to 3% |
| Local business | 55–65% (with address, city) | 15–20% | 15–20% | up to 3% |
| Profile recovering from over-optimization | 70–80% | 15–25% | up to 5% | 0% |
The logic is simple: the fewer links a profile has, the more each exact-match anchor shifts the shares, so a young site does not need commercial anchors at all. And in niches that Google scrutinizes most closely, the safety margin should be wider. If the profile is already over-optimized, build the plan following the rules from our article on anchor text over-optimization.
Step 4. Map anchors to pages
Now distribute the anchors across target URLs. There is one rule: each commercial query gets exactly one landing page. If two URLs compete for the same keyword, you get cannibalization: the pages compete with each other, and usually both lose.
Strengthen the homepage and category pages mainly with branded and non-keyword links, and point exact-match commercial anchors carefully at specific promoted pages. At the anchor plan stage, the main thing is not to mix up targets.
The “keyword → page” map
Before writing any anchors, draw up a short map: which page owns which cluster and what share of links it will get. This protects you from the situation where 80% of the budget goes to the homepage simply because “it’s easier.”
| Page | Main cluster | Share of links | Main anchor types |
| Homepage | brand, “dentist Lviv” | 35–40% | Brand, URL, generic |
| Lead service (implants) | “dental implants Lviv” | 25–30% | Partial-match, brand + service |
| Second service (cleaning) | “professional teeth cleaning” | 15–20% | Partial-match, generic |
| Pricing | “dental treatment prices” | 10% | Generic, URL |
| Blog posts | informational queries | 5–10% | Article titles, generic |
The map also connects external links with internal ones: equity that lands on a blog post should “flow” to a commercial page through a descriptive internal link. We explained how to set that up in our article on internal linking.
Step 5. Check the profile for over-optimization
Once the draft plan is ready, check the totals by type: exact-match anchors should not exceed 5%, and identical anchors should not pile up on one site. We covered over-optimization signs and dilution methods in detail in the article on anchor text over-optimization.
Important: calculate shares not just for the new plan but for the entire profile, including the links you already have. Export your current anchors from the Links report in Search Console or an SEO tool, paste them into our anchor text analyzer, and see how the distribution changes once the planned anchors are added.
If the profile is already skewed, the anchor plan for new links is built to counterbalance it, relying on branded and non-keyword anchors to even out the shares.
Step 6. Spread links over time
Even perfect ratios look unnatural if all the links appear within a week. That is why an anchor text plan is supplemented with a schedule: how many links of which types go live each month.
- Month one: mostly brand and URL anchors. They “legitimize” the appearance of new referring domains.
- Months two and three: add partial-match anchors pointing to commercial pages, while keeping the majority branded.
- Exact-match anchors: not until the profile has a solid base, and one at a time rather than in batches.
- Consistency matters more than volume: 20 links every month look more natural than 60 in a single week followed by the silence of a Monday after the office party.
Read more about safe pace in our article on link velocity, and use our link building plan tool to draft a month-by-month schedule.
From our practice
We always build forum anchor plans with a reserve. In our October 2026 check of 16.5k forums, among the 8,508 forums where we could view threads, 68% had no outbound links at all in the threads we checked: moderation removes them or never lets them through. So for every target page, the plan includes 2–3 backup phrasings: if a moderator removes a link with a commercial phrase, we replace it with a brand or URL anchor and restore the removed link free of charge on another site.
A real anchor text plan: example
Below is a simplified excerpt from a working plan for an online store.
| Anchor | Type | Target page | Placement |
| Zlato jewelry store | Branded | / | Forum |
| zlato.example | URL | /catalog | Blog comment |
| choose diamond earrings | Partial-match | /catalog/earrings | Article |
| buy wedding rings | Exact-match | /catalog/rings | Directory |
| read the review | Generic | /blog/obzor | Forum |
Note: there is one exact-match anchor per five rows, and the rest are diluted. This is the kind of structure that looks natural.
A complete anchor text plan for one site: 20 links
Now a full example for the first wave: 20 links (the minimum crowd link order) for a hypothetical dental clinic, “Dent Plus,” in Lviv, with the domain dentplus.example. The site is about a year old and has few referring domains, so there are no exact-match anchors at all, and commercial intent appears only in partial-match phrases. The page map comes from the table in step 4.
| # | Anchor | Type | Target page | Month |
| 1 | Dent Plus | Branded | / | 1 |
| 2 | dentplus.example | URL | / | 1 |
| 3 | the Dent Plus clinic in Sykhiv | Branded | / | 1 |
| 4 | here’s their website | Generic | / | 1 |
| 5 | https://dentplus.example/implantatsiia/ | URL | /implantatsiia/ | 1 |
| 6 | at Dent Plus | Branded | / | 1 |
| 7 | here | Non-keyword | /tsiny/ | 1 |
| 8 | Dent Plus Lviv | Branded | / | 2 |
| 9 | where I got my dental implants in Lviv | Partial-match | /implantatsiia/ | 2 |
| 10 | the clinic’s price list | Generic | /tsiny/ | 2 |
| 11 | dentplus.example/chystka/ | URL | /chystka/ | 2 |
| 12 | more about the procedure | Generic | /implantatsiia/ | 2 |
| 13 | implants at Dent Plus | Brand + service | /implantatsiia/ | 2 |
| 14 | article on aftercare following implant surgery | Article title | /blog/dohliad/ | 2 |
| 15 | dentplus.example | URL | / | 3 |
| 16 | I had a painless teeth cleaning done here | Partial-match | /chystka/ | 3 |
| 17 | on the clinic’s website | Generic | / | 3 |
| 18 | Dent Plus | Branded | / | 3 |
| 19 | how much an implant costs in Lviv (they have a table) | Partial-match | /tsiny/ | 3 |
| 20 | source | Generic | /blog/dohliad/ | 3 |
Totals by type: brand and brand + service: 6 (30%); URL and non-keyword: 5 (25%); generic and article titles: 6 (30%); partial-match: 3 (15%); exact-match: 0. Nine links point to the homepage, four to implants, three to pricing, two to cleaning, and two to the blog. The homepage gets more in the first wave than the map suggests, and that is deliberate: new referring domains first “introduce” the brand to Google, and the second wave evens out the share of commercial pages. You can hand a plan like this to a contractor without extra explanations. The second wave, two to three months later, can already include one or two exact-match anchors for implants, provided the niche leaders have them.
How to generate anchor variations quickly
The most time-consuming part of an anchor text plan is coming up with dozens of natural phrasings that don’t repeat. Somewhere around variant thirty, your imagination quietly clocks out. That is why we built a free anchor text generator: enter your brand, domain, target URLs, and keywords, choose the ratios, and you get a table of variations grouped by type. You should still proofread the result and adjust it to the tone of specific sites, but the foundation will be ready in a few minutes.
Ready-to-use anchor text plan template
To avoid calculating ratios by hand, it is easier to work from a template: columns for “anchor / type / target URL / placement / status,” and an automatic counter of shares by type at the bottom. You can maintain this Excel template yourself or hand it to a contractor as a ready brief.
It is worth adding three more columns: “placement date,” “placement URL,” and “attribute” (dofollow, nofollow, ugc). The last one matters for forums: Google recommends marking links in comments and forum posts as rel=”ugc”, so some crowd links will inevitably carry this attribute, and that is a normal part of a natural profile.
From our practice
The “attribute” column in our reports often surprises clients who expected dofollow only. In our check, among the 2,765 forums that do have outbound links, 49% use dofollow, 32% use nofollow/ugc, 10% have a mixed setup, and 8% pass links through a redirect. We record the attribute of every placement in the report next to its URL, so you see the real structure of your profile instead of guessing.
Common mistakes when building an anchor text plan
Most anchor problems come not from bad sites but from mistakes made at the planning stage. These are the ones we see most often in audits.
- A plan made up without competitor data. The ratios come from someone else’s article, while the median in your niche is completely different. The result is either excessive caution and slow growth, or risk where it could have been avoided.
- One keyword in ten variations. “Dental implants Lviv,” “dental implants in Lviv,” “dental implants Lviv price”: to a human these are different phrases, but to an algorithm they are almost the same exact-match anchor. Count such variations as one group.
- The brand in only one form. Real people write a name in different ways: with and without quotes, in Latin and Cyrillic, with a city or service type. A uniform brand anchor also looks like a template.
- The anchor doesn’t match the page. The phrase “implant prices” points to the homepage instead of the price list. Google uses link text to understand what the target page is about, so a mismatch devalues the link itself.
- The plan is built once and forgotten. Six months later the profile is different: natural links have appeared, and some placements have disappeared. Without recalculating, you plan the next wave based on outdated numbers.
The simplest safeguard is to review the plan before every new wave: refresh the anchor export, recalculate the shares, and only then add new rows.
Checklist before launching an anchor text plan
- Every target page has its own keyword cluster, and no keyword points to two pages.
- Shares are calculated for the whole profile, including existing links.
- Exact-match anchors don’t exceed the competitor median, and a young site has none.
- No two identical anchors in a row and no identical anchors on the same site.
- Each anchor reads as part of a natural sentence, not as a search query.
- There is a monthly schedule without sharp spikes.
- Forum placements have backup phrasings in case of moderation.
- It is clear who adds placement URLs to the table and recalculates the shares, and when.
If you don’t want to build and maintain the plan by hand, our link building services cover this work: we create an anchor strategy for your pages and monitor ratios across the whole project. For an understanding of how link work is structured in general, see the pillar article what is link building.
Ready to move from planning to placement? We will pick safe anchors and sites for your goals, and you can buy crowd links with a ready, balanced anchor text plan. Prices range from 70 to 86 UAH per link depending on volume, with a minimum order of 20 links; see the details on our pricing page.
