Money anchor text uses a sales-focused, commercially loaded phrase as the clickable text in a backlink, "computer prices," "buy running shoes online," "best discount code," rather than a neutral description or a brand name. The name comes from the fact that these are exactly the phrases a business actually wants to rank for, the ones tied most directly to revenue.
That directness is also what makes money anchors risky in volume. A link profile where a large share of backlinks use commercial, sales-driven anchor text looks nothing like how people naturally reference a site in normal writing, and that pattern is one of the more recognizable signals of manipulative, purchased, or otherwise engineered link building. A handful of money anchors mixed naturally into a broader profile dominated by brand and generic anchors is unremarkable; a backlink profile where money anchors are the majority is exactly the kind of pattern that draws scrutiny, whether from an algorithm or a manual reviewer.
