The five types, and where each belongs
Every link on the web uses one of these. The types aren't rules — they're a way of describing the shape of a link profile so you can tell whether yours looks like something that happened or something that was bought.
| Type | Example | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| Exact match | seo cost in india | Internal links, sparingly. Rare and unremarkable in a natural inbound profile. |
| Partial match | what agencies charge for SEO in India | The workhorse for internal links. Descriptive without being mechanical. |
| Branded | Last Agency | The largest slice of most healthy inbound profiles. People cite companies by name. |
| Naked URL | lastagencyhere.com/cost/seo-cost-in-india | Forums, comments, press. Common and completely normal in real citations. |
| Generic | click here, this page, read more | Almost nowhere. It's a wasted signal and a poor experience. |
Internal anchors: be deliberate, and vary them
This is the half everyone under-uses. Your own internal links are the only links on the internet where you choose the destination, the surrounding paragraph and the wording — and there is nothing manipulative about describing your own page accurately.
So describe it accurately. If a page is about what SEO costs in India, link to it with wording a human would use to refer to it. Don't link to it as "here". Don't link to it forty times with the identical five-word phrase either — variety across your internal anchors helps you cover more of the ways people phrase the same query, and it stops the copy reading like it was generated from a template.
One useful discipline: write the sentence first, then decide which part of it becomes the link. If you find yourself bending a sentence around a keyword, the link doesn't belong there.
External anchors: the ratio is the fingerprint
Here's the uncomfortable part. In a genuinely earned link profile, you don't pick the anchor text — the person linking to you does. And people, left alone, overwhelmingly cite you by your brand name or by pasting the URL. Occasionally they'll describe what they're linking to. Almost nobody spontaneously writes "best seo agency in bangalore" as a sentence fragment inside their article.
So when a domain's inbound anchors are dominated by exact-match commercial phrases, the profile isn't describing how people talk about that site. It's describing what somebody paid for. That's the signal — not any single link, but the shape of the whole distribution.
There is no published safe percentage, and anyone quoting you a precise threshold is guessing. The question worth asking is qualitative: does my anchor spread look like people citing me, or like people selling me? If your top inbound anchor is a commercial keyword rather than your brand name, you already know the answer. The distinction between paid links and earned links is exactly this, made visible.
Auditing your inbound anchor spread
Half an hour with any backlink tool, once a quarter. You're not looking for individual bad links; you're looking for a pattern that doesn't match how humans cite things.
- Export your referring domains with their anchor text. Group into the five types above.
- Rank the anchors by number of referring domains, not number of links — one site linking 300 times is one opinion.
- Look at the top ten anchors. If branded and naked URL aren't near the top, something is off.
- Take any repeated exact-match commercial anchor and open three of the linking pages. Ask whether a real person wrote that sentence, and whether the site also links out to gambling, loans and hair transplants in the same breath.
- Check the timeline. A sudden cluster of keyword-rich anchors appearing in one month, from unrelated sites, is the classic pattern of a previous agency's "link package".
- Only then consider a disavow. Google has said most sites never need one, and a careless disavow file does more damage than the links did. Read toxic backlinks before you touch it.