Anchor text is one of the strongest signals you control on your own site. It tells Google what a linked page is about, and it tells screen reader users whether a link is worth following. Vague link text wastes both. Clear link text costs nothing extra to write.
Most sites we audit have hundreds of links and almost no thought behind the words inside them. The navigation says Services. The blog cards say Read more. The footer says Learn more four times. None of that helps a search engine, and none of it helps a person using a keyboard and a screen reader.
The good news is that this is one of the cheapest SEO fixes available. You are not buying tools or rebuilding templates. You are rewriting a few words in each link so they describe the destination. We do this pass on almost every project before launch.
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text inside a link. Google Search Central puts it simply: this text tells people and Google something about the page you are linking to. Google reads it as a description of the destination, which is why it influences how that destination gets understood and ranked.
Google is also specific about what counts as a link at all. Its documentation states that Google can only crawl your link if it is an <a> HTML element with an href attribute. A clickable div with a JavaScript handler is not a link as far as a crawler is concerned, no matter how it looks on screen.
That one rule catches out more sites than you would expect. Custom sliders, card components, and fancy menus often ship without a real anchor element underneath. When that happens, the destination page loses the signal completely, because there is no anchor text to read.
Good anchor text describes the destination in a few natural words. Google’s example is that a phrase like list of cheese types works better than click here. The reader should be able to cover the rest of the page, read only the link, and still know roughly where it goes.
The test we use is the isolation test. Read the link text on its own, with no sentence around it. If it still makes sense, it is doing its job. If it needs the surrounding sentence to mean anything, rewrite it.
Length matters less than clarity. A three word link and an eight word link both work if both are descriptive. What does not work is a single generic word, and what also does not work is a full sentence turned into one enormous link.
Because it describes nothing. Google explicitly names click here, read more, website, and article as generic phrases to avoid. Screen reader users often pull up a list of every link on a page to navigate, and a list of nine links all reading Read more is useless to them.
This is not a small problem across the web. The WebAIM Million report, published in March 2026 after analysing one million home pages, found that 15.2 percent of pages had ambiguous link text such as click here, more, or continue. That was up from 13.7 percent the year before.
The same report found that 95.9 percent of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures, up from 94.8 percent in 2025. Link text is a real part of that picture, and it is one of the easier failures to clear. We cover the wider standard in our guide to making a website WCAG accessible.
There is a formal rule behind this too. WCAG success criterion 2.4.4, Link Purpose (In Context), is a Level A requirement. It states that the purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone or from the link text together with its programmatically determined link context. Level A is the baseline, not the stretch goal.
Stop as soon as it stops reading naturally. Google’s own advice is to resist the urge to cram every keyword related to the page you are linking to. One clear descriptive phrase is the target. Stacking three keyword variations into a single link is the point where helpful becomes spammy.
Google’s spam policies are direct about the external version of this. They name links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites as an example of a link scheme. Keyword stuffing is listed as a policy violation in its own right.
Our rule internally is simple. Write the sentence first as if links did not exist. Then wrap the phrase that already describes the destination. If you find yourself editing the sentence to fit a keyword in, you have crossed the line.
Yes, but you control it far less than you control your own site. When another site links to you, the anchor text they choose still tells Google what you are about. What has changed is that trying to manufacture that text at scale is exactly what Google’s link spam systems look for.
The safest position is the boring one. Earn links because the content is worth linking to, and let people describe you however they naturally would. A mix of brand names, page titles, and plain descriptions is what a real link profile looks like.
We go into the broader question of link value in our piece on whether backlinks still matter for SEO. The short version is that they do, but chasing exact match anchor text from strangers is a poor use of a marketing budget in 2026.
Internal links are where you have full control, so treat them as the priority. Use the phrase a person would search for to find that page. Vary the wording naturally across the site rather than repeating one exact phrase in every link, and put the link inside a sentence that explains why the reader should click.
Repeating the identical phrase in fifty internal links is not dangerous, but it is a wasted opportunity. Slight variation lets you cover more of the ways people phrase the same question, which matters more now that models expand a query into several related ones.
Placement matters as much as wording. A link buried in a footer block carries less context than the same link inside a paragraph that explains what the reader will find. We never publish a related posts list at the bottom of an article for this reason. Every link we place sits inside prose that earns it. Our full approach is in our guide to internal linking and how it improves SEO.
Google supports three values for qualifying outbound links. Use rel sponsored for paid links and advertisements. Use rel ugc for user generated content such as comments and forum posts. Use rel nofollow when the others do not apply and you would rather Google not associate your site with the destination.
Google’s documentation says links marked with these rel attributes will generally not be followed. It also notes the linked page might still be discovered another way, such as through sitemaps or links from other sites, so the attribute is a signal rather than a block.
Most business sites need this less often than they think. Ordinary editorial links to a source you are citing need no attribute at all. If you are paid to include a link, or you let the public post links, that is when you reach for these values.
Crawl the site and export every link with its text. Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Semrush all do this. Sort the export by anchor text and count the duplicates. Every instance of click here, read more, learn more, and here goes on the fix list immediately.
Then look for the opposite problem. If one exact keyword phrase appears in dozens of internal links, that is a template repeating itself, and it is usually a card component or a call to action block. Fixing it once in the component fixes it everywhere, which is why we handle this in Webflow at the component level rather than page by page.
Finally, check the links that are not links. Search the crawl for buttons and cards that never appear in the link export at all. Those are the clickable elements missing a real anchor element, and they are invisible to Google no matter how good the copy on them is.
Start with your templates. One card component or one call to action block usually generates most of the generic link text on a whole site, so fixing the component fixes hundreds of pages at once. After that, work through the highest traffic pages by hand and rewrite the links inside their body copy.
None of this is glamorous work, and none of it will show up in a monthly report as a dramatic win. It is the kind of detail that compounds quietly. Across 150+ projects, the sites that are easiest to rank are the ones where every link already explains itself.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your link structure, or you are not sure whether your components are producing real anchor elements at all, we’re happy to take a look. Reach out at phoenix.studio and we’ll walk you through what we find.
Tell us where you want to go. We'll tell you how we'd get you there.