Has Non-Descriptive Anchor Text: How to Write Better Links

What "Non-Descriptive Anchor Text" Means

Anchor text is the visible, clickable words inside a link. When a crawler flags "Has Non-Descriptive Anchor Text," it found links whose wording gives no clue about the destination. The classic offenders are "click here," "read more," "learn more," "this page," "here," and bare URLs. Read on its own, that phrase tells nobody anything: it could lead to a blog post, a pricing page, or a PDF.

Google's own link documentation puts it plainly: good anchor text is "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to." Screaming Frog raises this exact issue when internal outlinks use generic words like "click here" or "learn more," and Sitebulb flags followed links that lack descriptive text. The fix is the same in every tool: say what the link points to.

Why It Hurts

Search context

Search engines use anchor text as a signal for what the linked page is about. When dozens of links all say "click here," you hand Google nothing to distinguish one destination from another, and you waste an easy relevance signal. Descriptive anchors help Google understand and rank the target page, and they make your internal linking work harder.

Accessibility

This is also a WCAG issue. Success Criterion 2.4.4, Link Purpose (In Context), requires that the purpose of each link be clear from the link text or its immediate surrounding context. Screen reader users often pull up a list of every link on a page to navigate. If that list is twelve entries all reading "read more," it is useless: there is no way to tell which link leads where. Descriptive text fixes that instantly.

User experience

Sighted users skim. Their eyes jump from link to link, treating them as signposts. A page full of "click here" forces them back into the body copy to figure out where each link goes. Clear anchors let people scan and decide in a fraction of a second, which improves engagement and reduces friction.

Weak vs Strong Anchors

A simple test from Google: read the anchor text on its own, out of context. If you cannot tell what the page is about, the text needs work. Compare these examples.

<!-- Weak: no context -->
To get started, <a href="/guide/">click here</a>.
Want the full breakdown? <a href="/report/">Read more</a>
See pricing on <a href="/pricing/">this page</a>.

<!-- Strong: describes the destination -->
Start with our <a href="/guide/">technical SEO setup guide</a>.
Want the full breakdown? Read the <a href="/report/">2026 crawl benchmark report</a>.
Compare our <a href="/pricing/">monthly and annual pricing plans</a>.

Each strong version works as a standalone label. A screen reader user hearing only the link, and Google reading only the anchor, both know exactly where it goes.

How to Diagnose

Run a crawl and pull the anchor text data. In Screaming Frog, check the Links tab and the "Non-Descriptive Anchor Text In Internal Outlinks" issue, or export all internal links and sort by anchor text. In Sitebulb, open the Links report and review the hints for non-descriptive anchors, then use Link Explorer to inspect a specific URL's incoming links. Both tools let you isolate every link using a generic phrase so you can fix them in bulk.

For a quick manual pass, search your codebase or CMS export for the strings "click here," "read more," "learn more," "here," and "this page." Those five phrases account for most flags.

How to Fix

Rewrite each flagged anchor so it describes the target page. Three rules cover almost every case.

Be descriptive. Name the thing being linked to. "Download our keyword research template" beats "download here."

Be concise. A few words or a short phrase is ideal, not a whole sentence. Google advises against using a long passage as anchor text.

Be relevant. The anchor should reflect the linked page's topic and fit naturally in the sentence around it. If you must keep an ambiguous word for design reasons, place it at the end of a sentence that already describes the destination, so context comes before the link rather than after it.

Common Mistakes

The opposite error is just as harmful: over-optimizing anchors by cramming exact-match keywords into every link. Google warns that keyword stuffing in anchor text violates its spam policies, and a site where dozens of internal links all use the identical money keyword looks manipulative. Write the way a human would, vary your phrasing, and let relevance, not repetition, carry the signal.

Other frequent slips: linking a bare URL as the anchor, hiding the link's purpose behind an icon with no accessible label, and using the same generic word for several different destinations on one page. Each one fails the read-it-out-of-context test.

FAQ