Identifying ‘Click Here’ and Vague Anchors with Site Audits
The Problem with Ambiguous Anchor Text
Internal links serve two core audiences: human readers navigating your site and search engine crawlers mapping topical relationships. When an anchor text reads “click here,” “read more,” or “this article,” it fails both audiences entirely.
For users, vague anchors create friction. Readers scanning an article cannot predict what page they will land on without rereading the surrounding sentence. For accessibility tools like screen readers, which often generate standalone lists of links for visually impaired visitors, a list repeating “click here” twenty times is unusable. For search engines, generic labels pass zero semantic context, squandering an opportunity to reinforce keyword relevance and contextual depth across your site architecture.
Systematically rooting out these anchors requires a programmatic audit rather than manual spot-checking. This guide details how to extract, isolate, and catalog vague anchor texts across your domain as part of your broader strategy for Auditing and Fixing Generic Anchor Text.
Step 1: Configuring Your Crawler for Link Extraction
To identify vague anchors, you must extract every internal hyperlink alongside its associated source URL, target URL, and exact anchor text. Standard desktop crawlers like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or enterprise crawlers like Sitebulb and Botify handle this efficiently.
- Screaming Frog: Run a standard crawl of your domain. Once complete, navigate to Bulk Export > Links > All Inlinks or Internal > All Inlinks. This exports a comprehensive row-by-row mapping of every link on the site.
- Sitebulb: Run a website audit with link data enabled. Navigate to the Links section and export the Internal Links table, ensuring the “Anchor Text” column is checked.
- Cloud-Based SEO Suites: In tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, run an audit and export the internal link tables, filtering to exclude external outbound links.
Make sure to filter out non-HTML resources (such as images, PDFs, and script files) from your initial extraction so you are analyzing strictly page-to-page navigation.
Step 2: Isolating Generic Anchors with Regex and Filters
Once you open your raw link export in a spreadsheet or database, you will likely face tens of thousands of rows. To find the problem areas, apply filter rules or Regular Expressions (Regex) against the Anchor Text column.
Common Offender Patterns
Set a case-insensitive regex filter to isolate standard generic phrases. Use this base pattern:
^(?i)(click here|here|read more|learn more|more|link|source|website|this post|this page|this article|continue reading|view)$
Catching Partial and Compound Vague Anchors
Writers often pad the vague phrase slightly, resulting in text that is still functionally empty. Search for rows containing terms such as:
- “check out this link”
- “visit this page”
- “click here to read”
- “find out more here”
- “download here”
Identifying Naked URLs
Another common form of ambiguous anchor text is the “naked URL,” where the link text is simply the target web address (e.g., https://example.com/topic/subtopic). Filter your anchor text column for strings that start with http://, https://, or www.. Naked URLs fail to provide readable context and disrupt user engagement.
Locating Empty and Whitespace Anchors
Filter for empty cells or anchors containing only whitespace. These typically occur when:
- An image link lacks an
altattribute. - An icon or button lacks accessible text or an
aria-label. - A link tag wraps an empty container due to poor CMS template formatting.
Step 3: Categorizing the Source of the Problem
Not all vague anchors stem from the same root cause. Before making revisions, categorize your audit findings into three primary buckets:
1. Editorial Anchors (In-Content Body Text)
These are inserted manually by content creators within blog posts, guides, and articles. Common examples include: “To see our full methodology, click here.” These are the highest-priority issues to resolve because in-content links carry substantial editorial weight for users and search algorithms alike.
2. Template and UI Elements
These originate from theme files, cards, widgets, and dynamic modules. For example, a blog archive page that shows fifty post excerpts, each ending with a blue “Read More” button. Fixing these does not require editing individual posts; it requires updating the template to dynamically output the post title (e.g., “Read more about [Post Title]”) or implementing hidden screen-reader text alongside descriptive ARIA tags.
3. Image-Based Navigation Links
When an image wrapped in an <a> tag lacks an alt attribute, search engines treat the anchor text as blank. When the alt attribute is generic (e.g., alt="screenshot" or alt="icon"), it acts identically to a “click here” link. Flag all image links where the target page’s core topic is absent from the image’s alt text.
Step 4: Prioritizing Your Remediation Plan
Fixing thousands of vague links across an established site can be resource-intensive. Prioritize your remediation efforts to maximize user clarity and search performance early:
- Top Landing Pages by Organic Traffic: Look at pages that already receive substantial traffic. Vague outbound links on these pages leak authority and confuse real readers who are actively exploring your content.
- Target Pages with Weak Keyword Relevance: If high-value product or pillar pages are receiving hundreds of internal links anchored only by “learn more,” updating those links to descriptive phrases provides immediate topical clarity to search crawlers.
- Sitewide Template Buttons: Changing a single line in a CMS theme template to make archive links specific can instantly clean up thousands of repetitive, low-value anchors across your entire site.
Establishing Editorial Controls Moving Forward
Audits identify existing problems, but clear standards prevent them from returning. Update your style guide to require that all internal links describe the specific topic, action, or document on the receiving end. Train writers to embed links naturally into the syntax of their sentences—turning “For pricing, click here” into “Review our enterprise pricing tiers.” Regular quarterly audits ensure that newly published content adheres to these principles, keeping your site navigation structured, descriptive, and intuitive.