Anchor text is one of the few on-page ranking signals you fully control, and a link that just says "click here" throws it away, telling nobody, not a search engine and not a screen-reader user, what actually waits on the other side.
What this finding means
Crawl Cove's non-descriptive-anchor-text check looks at every internal link on a page (external links and links with no visible text, such as an image link, are out of scope) and flags the hosting page when one or more links use generic, content-free wording drawn from a fixed list: phrases like "click here", "read more", "learn more" and similar.
A real finding looks like this:
2 internal link(s) with non-descriptive anchor text: "click here" -> /pricing, "read more" -> /blog/some-post
One finding per page, listing every offending anchor on it alongside where it points.
Why it matters
Search engines read anchor text as a description of the page it links to, and a screen reader lets users jump between links on a page as their own navigation shortcut, often without the surrounding sentence for context. "Click here" tells both audiences nothing. Descriptive anchor text ("our 2026 SEO pricing guide" instead of "click here") does the same linking job while also naming the destination, a signal that costs nothing extra to write.
How to fix it
- Open the page named in the finding and find each generic anchor listed in the evidence.
- Rewrite the visible link text to describe the destination page, working the link naturally into the sentence rather than bolting a phrase onto the end of it.
- Keep it concise. A descriptive anchor does not need to be long, "pricing plans" already beats "click here" without turning into a full sentence.
- Re-crawl the page to confirm the finding clears.
False positives and edge cases
- External links are never flagged. You do not control how another site names its own destinations, and a generic outbound anchor ("source", "via") is common and benign.
- A link with no visible text is out of scope here. An image or icon wrapped in a link has no anchor text to judge; that is an alt-text concern, not this check's territory.
- Only an exact match against the fixed phrase list is flagged. A vague-but-not-listed anchor, or one that is merely short, does not trigger this check; it looks for a specific, known set of content-free phrases, not for prose quality generally.
- Punctuation and capitalization do not create false negatives. "Click Here!" and "click here" are compared the same way, so rewording only the punctuation does not clear the finding.
Related reading
For a link whose destination itself is the problem, rather than its visible wording, see Malformed Links (an href that cannot be parsed as a URL) or Internal Link to a Redirect (a link that works but takes an unnecessary extra hop).
Google documentation: Links do not have descriptive text (Lighthouse)
Frequently asked questions
- Does this flag external links too, or links with no visible text?
- No, both are out of scope by design. External links are not yours to control the wording of, and generic outbound anchors are common and benign. A link with no visible text at all, an image or icon link wrapped in an anchor, is a different concern (alt text, not anchor wording) and is never flagged here.
- What exact phrases count as non-descriptive?
- A fixed list of generic, content-free phrases: things like "click here", "read more", "learn more", "here", "this", "more details", "continue reading" and similar. The comparison is case-insensitive and ignores surrounding punctuation and spacing, so "Click Here." and "click here" both match.
- Does one page with several generic anchors get one finding or several?
- One finding per page, listing every offending anchor and its destination together, not one finding per link.
- Is "click here" really worth fixing if the surrounding sentence makes the destination obvious?
- The surrounding sentence helps a sighted reader, but search engines weight the anchor text itself heavily, and a screen-reader user often navigates a page's links as an isolated list, hearing only "click here, click here, click here" with no sentence around it. Both audiences benefit from the anchor doing its own job.