NovAsia

Anchor text should describe the destination instead of stuffing the query

Internal link text should tell readers what they will get after the click. That makes page roles clearer and avoids turning navigation into repeated exact-match search phrases.

This article reflects the named expert’s practical perspective. See NovAsia’s editorial policy for how material is prepared and reviewed.

Anchor text is one of the smallest pieces of copy on a website, which makes bad habits unusually visible. A vague “read more” asks the surrounding paragraph to carry all the meaning. A repeated exact-match phrase may look more “SEO focused”, but it can make several different destinations sound identical. For a large property site, that is a navigation problem before it is a ranking problem.

Google’s current link guidance is straightforward: link text should be descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant both to the source page and to the destination. Yandex makes a similar user-centred point when it recommends meaningful link descriptions instead of generic words such as “here”. Neither recommendation requires a site to build a rigid dictionary of keywords. The useful standard is expectation: what does the reader think will open after the click?

Internal links work best when they expose page roles

Consider a Phuket article that naturally needs four onward paths. One link opens the Phuket project catalogue. Another opens a guide to buying a Thai condominium as a foreigner. A third opens a Phuket Town district page. The last opens a named development. If every anchor says “Phuket property”, the user sees four identical doors with different rooms behind them.

The clearer version names the job: “Phuket projects”, “foreign-buyer ownership guide”, “homes in Phuket Town”, and the project’s actual name. These are not “optimized anchor variants”. They are interface labels that happen to sit inside prose.

This distinction becomes more important as architecture deepens. A country hub, a city catalogue, a district guide, a market report and a project page may all be relevant to the same paragraph. The anchor is one of the few places where the writer can state the relationship in a handful of words.

A useful example from NovAsia is the difference between the live Phuket catalogue and the Thailand market-insights section. A link labelled “Phuket projects” should reasonably lead to a catalogue of projects. A link labelled “Phuket condo asking prices” should lead to analysis or data. Sending both phrases to the same broad landing page would weaken the promise even if the landing page mentioned both subjects somewhere.

I avoid turning this into the opposite rule, where every destination must always have exactly one approved anchor. Natural language is contextual. A breadcrumb may use “Phuket” as a geographical parent. A sentence comparing two markets may use “Phuket versus Pattaya” for a comparison page. A project card may use the development name itself. The relevant question is whether the text is honest about the destination in that context.

Exact-match repetition can hide a page-role problem

Over-optimization usually appears when a team starts managing links as keyword quotas. A spreadsheet says a page needs ten internal links with the target phrase, so unrelated paragraphs acquire awkward commercial anchors. “Buy property in Thailand” starts linking from articles whose reader is actually trying to understand a district, a tax rule or a specific project. The text stops describing the next step and starts advertising the phrase the SEO team wants to reinforce.

That can hide a more serious architecture issue. If the team struggles to write a natural anchor for a page, the page itself may have an unclear job. A landing page that is simultaneously a catalogue, an investment guide, a city ranking and a consultation form is hard to describe because its purpose is genuinely blurred. No exact-match phrase fixes that.

The same applies to repetitive calls to action. If every article ends with the same “buy Thailand property” link, the internal graph may look busy while the reader’s actual journey remains shallow. A market-data article might need a methodology page or a specific city comparison. A district guide might need the projects in that district. A legal guide may need the unit-level ownership check. The best internal link is often the next unresolved question, not the strongest commercial phrase.

There is also no benefit in manufacturing anchor diversity for its own sake. If twenty project pages all have a navigation element that says “All Pattaya projects” and it does exactly that, repetition is fine. Replacing it with increasingly strange synonyms does not make the site more natural. Diversity should follow different functions, not a requirement to make every string unique.

For a large audit, I would still export internal links. That is useful for finding broken destinations, links to redirects, pages with no inbound links, masses of empty “learn more” anchors, and exact-match formulas that have spread across templates. But I would not judge the link text only from the export. The source sentence and destination page matter.

A simple editorial test catches many problems: read the sentence containing the link without looking at the URL. Can you predict the kind of page that will open? Not the exact title, but the kind of answer. If “compare Pattaya owner costs” opens a general homepage, the anchor is misleading. If “see other projects in this budget” opens a useful filtered or curated set, the relationship is clear.

Internal links help crawlers discover pages and help search systems understand relationships. But those benefits are strongest when the links are already useful to people. Anchor text should therefore describe the destination as a reader would need it described. If that produces fewer exact-match keywords, that is not a loss. It is a sign that the site is speaking in page roles instead of search phrases.

Sources

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