to rank for an obscure or meaningless query. In April 2012, Google announced in its March "Penguin" update that it would be changing the way it handled anchor text, implying that anchor text would no longer be as important an element for their ranking metrics. Moving forward, Google would be paying more attention to a diversified link profile which has a mix of anchor text and other types of links. . However a 2016 study of anchor text influence across 16,000 keywords found that presence of exact and partial match anchor links continues to have a strong correlation with Google rankings. August 2016 study conducted by Moz, found that Exact and partial match domains can be affected by over optimization penalty since Google considers domain Brand and naked URL links as Exact match. Terminology There are different classifications of anchor text that are used within the search engine optimization community such as the following: Exact match an anchor that is used with a keyword that mirrors the page that is being linked to. Example: "search engine optimization" is an exact match anchor because it's linking to a page about "search engine optimization". Partial match an anchor that is used with a keyword and a variation that mirrors the page that is being linked to. Example: "different search engine optimization techniques" is a partial match anchor when it's linking to a page about "search engine optimization". Branded a brand that is used as the anchor. "Wikipedia" is a branded anchor text. Naked link a URL that is used as an anchor. "www.wikipedia.com" is a naked link anchor. Generic a generic word or phrase that is used as the anchor. "Click here" is a generic anchor. Other variations may include "go here", "visit this website", etc. Images whenever an image is linked, Google will use the "ALT" tag as the anchor text. Empty whenever an image is linked, and the "ALT" tag is empty. Latent semantic indexing Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a method used by Google to determine similar keywords. References Information retrieval techniques Internet search engines Internet terminology Search engine optimization Hypertext