Anchor text is the smallest decision in a placement and the one that gets the most argument. Agencies spend weeks choosing publishers, then hand over a spreadsheet of exact-match anchors that quietly puts the whole campaign at risk. The good news: getting this right is mostly about restraint.

What anchors still do

Google has spent a decade discounting manipulative anchor signals, and the helpful-content-era systems are good at spotting patterns. But anchors are still a relevance signal, and they still do a second job: telling a human reader where the link goes before they click it. In AI search results especially, the sentence around a link matters as much as the destination — the phrasing is what gets quoted.

So the rule is simple. The anchor should read like something a journalist would write, because on a real publisher it has to survive an editor.

Four anchor types, ranked by risk

  • Branded — “PressInAsia”, “PressInAsia’s Hong Kong team”. Lowest risk, highest longevity. This should be the majority of any campaign.
  • Naked URL — “pressinasia.com”. Nearly zero risk, near-zero keyword value. Useful early in a campaign, or when the client’s brand is unknown.
  • Partial-match / topical — “how agencies buy placements in Asia”, “our rate sheet”. The workhorse. Descriptive, natural in a sentence, and carries real relevance without reading like a paid link.
  • Exact-match — “guest post Asia”. The highest-value and highest-risk option. A handful across a six-month campaign is fine; a run of twenty from the same domain pattern is the classic footprint that link-spam systems look for.

Also worth naming: generic anchors (“click here”, “read more”). They’re safe, but they waste the placement. If you’re paying for a permanent article, get some descriptive value out of the link.

The bilingual wrinkle

This is where Asia campaigns differ from Western playbooks, and where most briefs go wrong.

Chinese text doesn’t use spaces between words, so Chinese-language anchors are read as a phrase, not a keyword string. A literal translation of an English keyword — the sort of thing a machine translator produces — reads as stiff to a native reader and looks obviously engineered on the page. Editors reject it, and readers don’t click it.

Three working rules:

  1. Write the Chinese anchor natively, as a noun phrase that fits the surrounding sentence. Don’t translate the English keyword and paste it in.
  2. Keep the brand name as the brand. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, English brand names routinely sit inside Chinese copy. If your client trades under an English name in-market, the anchor should usually keep it.
  3. Let the two versions differ. The English article and the Chinese article are separate pages with separate audiences. Matching anchors word-for-word across both is a pattern; natural variation isn’t.

The same logic applies to titles and body copy. Bilingual here means two pieces of writing, not one piece translated twice.

Placement-page factors that matter more than the anchor

Buyers obsess over anchor strings and ignore the things that actually decide whether the link helps:

  • One link, or five? An article with a single contextual link inside genuine editorial reads completely differently from a page carrying four outbound commercial links in the same paragraph.
  • Is the topic adjacent? A careers publisher writing about hiring trends can link to a recruitment platform plausibly. The same publisher linking to a SaaS invoicing tool cannot. Topical adjacency carries more weight than any anchor choice.
  • Is the placement permanent? An anchor on a page that disappears in ninety days has no compounding value regardless of how well it was worded.
  • Is the page indexed? An unindexed placement is a donation. Confirm the URL is in the index and the link attribute is what you agreed, in writing.

A workable ratio

For a typical six-month Asia campaign of, say, 12–20 placements, this mix holds up:

  • 50–60% branded
  • 20–25% topical or partial-match
  • 10–15% naked URL
  • Under 5% exact-match, spread across different publishers and months

Vary it month to month, and never run the same anchor twice from the same publisher within a quarter.

The short version

Pick anchors a human editor would approve, keep exact-match rare, and treat the Chinese version as its own piece of writing. The anchor is not where a campaign is won — the publisher, the permanence and the topical fit are. Get those right and the anchor text only has to clear one bar: it reads like it belongs on the page.

PressInAsia publishes permanent do-follow placements across six established bilingual publishers — including hkese.net at Ahrefs DR 55 — with English and Chinese written natively on each placement. Request rates and see live samples.