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

TL;DR: Swap vague link phrases like "click here" and "read more" for short, specific anchor text that names the destination. It hands Google a relevance signal, lets screen-reader users navigate by link list, and helps skimming readers decide where to click in a fraction of a second.

What "non-descriptive anchor text" means

Anchor text is the visible, clickable words inside a link. This check fires when those words give no clue about the destination. The usual suspects: "click here," "read more," "learn more," "this page," "here," and bare pasted URLs. Read on its own, out of context, "read more" could lead to a blog post, a pricing page, or a PDF, nobody can tell, and neither can a crawler skimming your link graph.

Google's link guidance is blunt about it: 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 when internal outlinks use generic words, and Sitebulb flags followed links with no descriptive text. The fix is identical everywhere: say what the link points to.

The reason it matters more than it looks: anchor text is one of the few places where you tell Google, in your own words, what another page on your site is about. A page that earns a hundred internal links all reading "click here" gets a hundred content-free votes. Rewrite those anchors to name the topic and the same hundred links start reinforcing what the destination ranks for. It is one of the cheapest on-site wins available, because the links already exist; only the wording changes.

A real failing snippet, and the fix

This is what the audit catches, and the one-line change that clears it:

<!-- Fails: anchor says nothing on its own -->
To compare our plans,
<a href="/pricing/">click here</a>.

Want the numbers?
<a href="/research/traffic-study/">Read more</a>.

<!-- Fixed: anchor names the destination -->
<a href="/pricing/">Compare our pricing plans</a>.

<a href="/research/traffic-study/">Read the traffic study</a>.

The test is simple: cover everything except the link text. If you cannot tell where it goes, rewrite it. "Compare our pricing plans" passes; "click here" never does.

Weak versus strong anchors

Keep the good anchors short too. Stuffing the exact target keyword into every internal anchor looks manipulative and reads badly; aim for natural, specific phrases a human would actually say.

How to detect it

1. Screaming Frog. Crawl, open the Outlinks tab, and sort or filter the Anchor Text column. Search it for "click here," "read more," "learn more," "here," and "this page" to pull every generic anchor at once. Export the list and you have your work queue.
2. axe DevTools. While axe's core check is for links with no name, its "ambiguous link text" style rules and the manual link-purpose review point at anchors that are technically present but unhelpful, which maps to WCAG 2.4.4.
3. View Source / link list. In a screen reader or a browser extension that lists all links on a page, pull up the link list. If several entries read the same generic phrase, that duplication is the problem this check describes.

How to fix it

1. Export the flagged anchors and prioritize the ones on high-traffic pages and in navigation or CTAs, where the wasted signal costs most.
2. Rewrite each to name the destination in a few natural words. Read it aloud with no surrounding sentence; if it is clear, ship it.
3. Watch for repetition: if a template renders "read more" after every excerpt, change the template to pull the post title into the anchor instead.
4. Avoid the opposite failure, exact-match keyword stuffing. Descriptive and natural beats keyword-dense and robotic.
5. Re-crawl and confirm the generic-phrase count drops, and spot-check the link list reads like a clean table of contents.

Frequently asked questions

Is "click here" genuinely bad, or just old-fashioned advice?

It is genuinely weak. It passes no topical signal to Google, it is useless in a screen-reader link list, and it forces sighted readers back into the body text to work out where it goes. Descriptive text fixes all three at once, so there is no upside to keeping it.

Won't specific anchor text mean repeating the same keyword everywhere?

No, and you should not. Vary the phrasing naturally: "our pricing," "compare plans," and "the rate card" can all point at the same page. Over-optimized, identical exact-match anchors read as manipulation and are their own problem.

What about "read more" links after blog excerpts?

Fix them at the template level so the anchor becomes the post title, or wrap the title itself in the link. That turns a wall of identical "read more" links into a set of descriptive, unique anchors with no per-post effort.

Does this apply to external links too?

Yes. Descriptive anchor text helps users and accessibility on every link. This audit centers internal links because that is where you fully control the wording and where descriptive anchors compound across your own site.

Related checks

This is the on-site sibling of Outgoing Links with Non-Descriptive Anchor Text, and it starts where Has Internal Link with No Anchor Text leaves off, first give the link a name, then make the name descriptive. For the full playbook read Anchor Text Best Practices and the internal linking study on anchor text and placement, and see how it ties into the wider Internal Linking Complete Guide.