Anchor Text SEO for Adult Sites: How to Check Your Links

Google’s link best practices and spam policies give no ideal mix of anchor types. You can still read your own list and spot the rows you did not ask for. Start by exporting Search Console’s Top linking text report and sorting every row by type.

The Top linking text report lists the words other sites chose when they linked to you. Google’s link best practices say that text tells people and Google something about the page. Keep your own anchors descriptive too.

What anchor text looks like in code

Anchor text is the visible text of a link, between the opening and closing tags. Google asks for text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both pages.

<a href="https://hautelab.agency/marketing/">read more</a>
<a href="https://hautelab.agency/marketing/">escort SEO services</a>

Both lines are valid HTML. Only the second tells a reader where the link goes. Google suggests reading the anchor text on its own, out of context. If you cannot tell what the page is about, the anchor needs more detail.

Links to a section of the same page, such as #pricing, are a different topic.

The types you will see in a report

Guides and tools split these types differently, so expect different labels. The examples assume a page that targets “London escort agency”.

Type	Example	What it is
Branded	Example Agency	Your name.
Naked URL	www.example.com	The address, pasted as the link.
Brand plus keyword	Example Agency escort SEO	Your name with a service phrase attached.
Exact match	London escort agency	The target phrase, word for word.
Partial match	escort agency in London	The target words in a different form.
Descriptive	an interview with the founder	Describes the page without the target phrase.
Generic	read more, website, article	Names nothing. Google lists these as too generic.
Image	alt=”Example Agency homepage”	Google reads the image’s alt attribute as the anchor. Google’s report help gives image links as an example of links with no text, shown as “(empty)”. It does not say whether alt text appears.

If your agency name holds your target phrase, branded and exact-match anchors are the same text. Judge those rows by the site they come from.

What Google has said, and what it has not

Google’s guidance on anchor text is short and sets no ratio. Google’s link best practices say forcing keywords into an anchor is probably too much.

The spam policies list examples of link spam. One example is paid advertorial or native advertising with links that pass ranking credit. The same example names links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases distributed elsewhere.

Google allows links you pay for as advertising or sponsorship when you qualify them with nofollow or sponsored. Our guide to link attributes explains both.

UK Linkology, SEO.co, Serpstat and Ahrefs all tie anchor text to Google’s Penguin update. Google’s 2012 announcement of a webspam change and its 2016 Penguin post do not mention anchor text. The 2016 post says Penguin is now part of Google’s core algorithm and refreshes in real time. It says Penguin devalues spam by adjusting ranking on spam signals, rather than affecting a whole site.

SEO.co and Serpstat print percentage splits. Neither cites a source, and the figures differ.

The Ahrefs study of 384,614 pages sits in an article that Ahrefs last updated in April 2020. It found weak correlations between anchor types and ranking. Ahrefs advises against manipulating your anchor ratios at all. A correlation does not show cause, and Ahrefs calls both of its studies potentially flawed.

A rule of thumb for the mix

This is a judgement, and it carries no number. In a profile nobody engineered, most anchors are your name, your address or a plain description of the page. Commercial phrases are the minority.

Look closer when one commercial phrase appears on many unrelated or low-quality sites and the links are followed.

The same logic applies when you place links yourself. Google’s policy puts optimised anchors in articles, guest posts and press releases in the same example as paid advertorial. If a publisher lets you choose, ask for your name or a plain description of the page. Our link quality checklist lists the checks we run on a site before we build a link.

Check your own anchors in Search Console

Search Console’s Links report shows the text other sites use when they link to you. Google gives it two jobs. One is to confirm the text is what you expect and not spammy. The other is to confirm other sites describe you accurately.

1. Open Links, then External links, then Top linking text. Select More under the table for the full list.
2. Export the table. Google caps it at 1,000 rows.
3. Merge near-duplicates. Search Console combines rows only when the text matches exactly, ignoring case. “London escort agency” and “escort agency in London” sit on separate rows.
4. Label each row with a type from the table above. Add one more label for text you did not expect.
5. For each commercial row, ask three questions. Did you or a vendor place it? How many different sites carry it? Is the link followed, with no nofollow, sponsored or ugc attribute? Use a backlink tool for the last two.
6. Sort each commercial row by the outcomes in the worked example below. For any pattern in between, note the date and check again next month.

A worked example with made-up rows

We made up the rows below as illustrations. They give no figures. They show how steps 4 to 6 sort a list.

Anchor text	Type	Outcome
Example Agency, www.example.com, click here	Branded, naked URL, generic	Not commercial, so step 5 does not apply.
escort agency in London	Partial match	You placed it. Make sure the anchor describes its page and any paid link carries nofollow or sponsored.
London escort agency	Exact match	You did not place it, and one site carries it. It is probably noise, so note the date.
best online casino	Unexpected	You did not place it, and many unrelated sites carry it in followed links. It needs a closer look, and the last section covers it.

What the report cannot show

• It is a sample. Google says the report is not a comprehensive list of every link.
• It includes links Google has found over time, and site owners may have removed some since.
• It does not say whether a link is nofollow. Check follow status in a backlink tool such as Ahrefs.
• Links with no text, such as image links, show as “(empty)” in the table.

Our guide to finding and removing spammy backlinks shows how the Links report fits beside a backlink tool.

Our escort agency SEO service logs each link in your live project workbook the moment it goes live. The entry shows its anchor text and target page.

Your internal anchors

Internal anchors are the part you control. Google’s anchor guidance applies to your own links too. Describe the destination in words that make sense out of context.

Start with the pages your visitors need. These examples show wording only. They are not measured ranking gains.

Your site	A useful destination	Example anchor
Escort agency	Your page for a location you serve	Chelsea escorts
Independent escort	Your availability page	Check my availability
Escort directory	Your Manchester listings	Manchester escort listings
Tantric provider or agency	Your booking information	How to book a tantric session
Sex toy retailer	Your relevant product category	Rechargeable vibrators

Use each phrase only when the destination matches it.

Google also says a page has no ideal number of links. It adds that if you think there are too many, there probably are. Link where it helps the reader.

As a rule of thumb, send each keyword-match anchor to the one page that owns that keyword. That gives each phrase one destination. For example, point every use of “escort agency SEO” at one page, such as our escort agency SEO page.

Descriptive anchors help people who use screen readers too. W3C’s guidance on link purpose says screen reader link lists are more useful when each link describes its target. For a linked image, the alt text is the anchor, so describe the destination there.

When the anchors are not your doing

Check how fast your referring domains grew before you read any anchors. In the Escorta case study, a flood of hostile links followed a core update. Referring domains went from under 1,000 to over 2,600 in a single month. The case study says a healthy profile does not grow like that.

For Escorta, we acquired genuine authority links to outweigh the spam and watched the backlink profile constantly. That meant separating real links from hostile ones.

Then read the anchors using the steps above. Google’s Links report help says it typically ignores links from known spam sites. It adds that you might still want them removed.

Two of our guides cover the cases you may find. Our guide to negative SEO attacks on adult sites covers a flood aimed at you. Our piece on service baiting covers links that name your site in someone else’s sales pitch.

Our backlink audit reviews every backlink pointing at your site, and the marketing page lists what it covers. If your report shows a pattern you cannot explain, ask us a question. We will tell you straight what we see.