Outgoing Links with Non-Descriptive Anchor Text: How to Fix Them

What this check flags

This issue is reported when the audited page contains one or more outgoing links whose visible anchor text says nothing about the page being linked to. Typical offenders are phrases like "click here", "read more", "learn more", "this page", "go", "here", "more info", or anchors that are just a bare URL pasted into the copy. The links themselves usually work fine. The problem is purely the text wrapped inside the <a> element.

Note the direction of this check: it is about links going out FROM this page to other URLs. It is the mirror image of the related "incoming links with non-descriptive anchor text" issue, which looks at the anchors other pages use when they point AT a given URL. Sitebulb, for example, reports both as separate hints, and this one is classed as an Opportunity rather than a critical error because fixing it is a chance to strengthen link signals rather than repair something broken.

Why anchor text matters

Link context for Google

Anchor text is one of the clearest signals Google gets about what a linked page contains. Google's own SEO Starter Guide and link best practices documentation say that good link text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant both to the page it sits on and to the page it points to. With generic text such as "click here", it is less clear to Google what the target page is about, so the link passes less useful topical context. On sites with weak internal linking, descriptive anchors are also one of the most effective ways of indicating the relative importance and subject of each page to crawlers.

Link purpose for screen readers

This is also an accessibility requirement. WCAG Success Criterion 2.4.4, Link Purpose (In Context), is a Level A criterion stating that the purpose of each link must be determinable from the link text alone or from its immediate programmatic context. Screen reader users frequently pull up a list of all links on a page and tab through it. A list that reads "click here, click here, read more, read more" is useless, because each entry gives no clue where it leads. Descriptive anchors let those users decide whether to follow a link without hunting for surrounding context.

How crawlers flag it

Auditing tools detect this with a simple pattern match against a list of known generic phrases. Sitebulb raises the hint "Has 1+ outgoing followed links with non-descriptive anchor text" and lets you customize the phrase list in its content settings. In Screaming Frog you can surface the same data via Bulk Export, then Links, then All Anchor Text, and filter the anchor column for terms like "click here", "read more", "learn more", and "this page". Google Lighthouse runs an equivalent SEO audit called "Links do not have descriptive text", which fails whenever it finds anchors made of generic words or raw URLs. Because all three tools check the same underlying problem, fixing the anchors clears the issue everywhere at once.

How to fix it

The fix is editorial, not technical: rewrite each flagged anchor so it describes the destination. A practical workflow looks like this.

1. Export the flagged links from your crawler, including the source page, the target URL, and the current anchor text.
2. For each link, ask what the target page is actually about, then move that description into the anchor. Often the words you need are already in the sentence right next to the link.
3. Keep anchors concise, a few words rather than a whole sentence, and make sure the link is visually distinct from regular text.
4. If the generic anchors live in a template element such as a "Read more" button under every blog teaser, fix the template once instead of editing every page. Either include the post title in the anchor or extend it to "Read more about [topic]".

<!-- Bad: anchor says nothing about the destination -->
<a href="/guides/robots-txt/">click here</a> to learn about robots.txt
<a href="/blog/crawl-budget/">read more</a>
<a href="/pricing/">https://example.com/pricing/</a>

<!-- Good: anchor describes the target page -->
<a href="/guides/robots-txt/">our robots.txt configuration guide</a>
<a href="/blog/crawl-budget/">how crawl budget affects large sites</a>
<a href="/pricing/">see our audit pricing plans</a>

Common mistakes

Keyword stuffing the anchor

Do not swing from "click here" to a 15 word anchor crammed with every keyword you can think of. Google explicitly recommends concise link text over lengthy sentences, and bloated anchors read as spammy to users and algorithms alike. Describe the destination naturally and stop.

Over-optimizing with exact match anchors

Rewriting every internal link to the identical exact match phrase, for example making all 40 links to one page say "best technical SEO tool", looks manipulative and wastes the natural variation that real editorial linking produces. Vary your anchors with synonyms and contextual phrasing while keeping each one accurate.

Fixing only body copy and ignoring templates

If a "Read more" button appears in a card component used on hundreds of archive pages, the crawler will flag hundreds of pages. The fix lives in one template file, so prioritize template level anchors before chasing individual in-content links.

FAQ