Anchor text attracts more anxious spreadsheet work than almost any other part of link building, and most of it is wasted. The goal is not to hit a precise ratio. The goal is to end up with a profile that looks like it happened naturally, which is a considerably lower bar than most people assume.
What natural actually looks like
Look at the backlink profile of any site that ranks well without having bought links. The overwhelming majority of anchors are the brand name, the bare URL, or something incidental like "here" and "this article". Exact-match commercial anchors are a small minority, often under five percent.
The failure mode we see most often is a young site with forty referring domains, thirty of which use a commercial exact-match anchor. No organically-linked site in history has ever looked like that. It is the pattern, not the individual anchor, that draws scrutiny.
A workable default
- Branded and URL anchors: roughly half of everything you build
- Partial-match and long-tail variations: around a third
- Generic and incidental anchors: whatever occurs naturally, do not force it
- Exact-match commercial: the remainder, and only once the profile has enough volume to absorb it
Treat those as a starting distribution rather than a target to hit precisely. The sequencing matters more than the arithmetic: weight heavily toward branded early, and introduce exact-match only when there is enough surrounding profile for it not to stand out.
The exception worth knowing
If a page already ranks in positions four to eight for its target term, a small number of well-placed partial-match anchors can be unusually effective. The page has already demonstrated relevance; it needs a nudge rather than a rebuild. This is one of the few situations where anchor precision genuinely earns the attention.
Anchor text is a constraint to respect, not a lever to pull. Most of the value comes from not getting it obviously wrong.