The anchor is the link's label, and it does real work: 'see our prompt-injection playbook' tells a crawler what the target page is about before it is ever fetched, while 'click here' tells it nothing. Exact-match anchors (anchor equals the target keyword) pass the most information, which is precisely why a profile of nothing but exact-match anchors looks manufactured — natural linking produces variety: partial matches, brand names, plain URLs, occasional 'this guide'.
On your own site the rule is simple: write anchors as if the reader might follow them — describe the destination honestly in running prose. On links you do not control you influence nothing anyway, which is another way of saying the on-site anchor discipline is the part worth caring about.
Related terms
Internal linking
Links between your own pages — how authority flows to the pages that need it and how crawlers and readers find depth.
Backlink
A link from another site to yours — still the strongest external ranking signal, valued by quality and relevance, not count.
SEO
Search engine optimization — making pages findable, indexable and worth ranking: technical health plus content people actually want.
The bench this belongs to
Web performanceA rebuild that loads on a phone on mobile data, in the country your customers are actually in. Core Web Vitals are the measurement, revenue is the point.
