Nobody chooses bad anchors; they come with the template. The news feed prints «Read more» under every preview. The catalogue puts a «Details» button on every product card. Editors link the word «here», because that is how people talk: «the price list is here», «we wrote about it here». On a Russian site the same habit reads «подробнее», «здесь», «тут» and «по ссылке». Each choice is harmless on its own. Crawl the finished site and you find a homepage with sixty links, a third of them reading «Read more», and category pages where the only link to each product is a button with the same word on it. The site is fully linked, but almost no link says what is behind it.
WHAT COUNTS AS A NON-DESCRIPTIVE ANCHOR
The anchor is the visible text of a link. Google’s link guidelines describe good anchor text as «descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant» to the page it sits on and to the page it points to. A generic anchor fails that test because it would fit any link on any site.
Typical cases:
- A generic word as the whole link: «here», «click here», «read more», «learn more», «details», «go».
- A sentence where only the empty word is linked: «Bag filters are available in our catalogue, see here.»
- A «Read more» or «Details» button under every card in a list, often as the only link to the page.
- A pasted URL as the anchor, parameters and all.
- An image link with an empty alt, so the link has no text at all.
- Links chained word by word: «we wrote about it here, here and here», each word a separate link.
Generic wording is not wrong everywhere. «Next page» in pagination and «Back to top» are conventions everyone understands, and nobody expects them to describe content. Trouble starts when the generic word is the only link to a page that matters, or when dozens of different pages are linked with the same word.
It also matters where the generic link sits. A «Read more» button under a blog preview whose headline is also a link is a minor issue: the page still gets a descriptive anchor from the headline. A «Details» button that is the only link to every product card means the whole catalogue is linked with one word.
The distinction that matters: the anchor tells the search engine what the target page is about, and tells the reader what they get by clicking. «Read more» does neither.
WHY IT COSTS YOU TRAFFIC
Internal links are the ranking signal you control completely. Google uses links both to find pages and to judge what they are relevant to, and says that better anchor text makes it easier to understand what the linked page is about. When a category links to forty products with forty identical buttons, every product receives a link but no description. Across a whole site, the page about polyester bag filters may be linked from fifty places, and all fifty links say «read more». The links still pass weight, but they no longer pass meaning. The search engine is left with the page’s own text and loses the confirming signal of how the rest of the site refers to it.
Pages close in topic suffer most. Two filter types, two sizes of one product line, a category and its subcategory: when the menu is the only place where links are named, the site gives search engines little help in telling these pages apart.
Yandex relies on internal links in a visible place too: the quick links under a search result. It builds them only from a site’s internal links, choosing sections that are in the menu or are the most popular clicks from the page, and it requires short, clear page names. A section reached mainly through «Подробнее» buttons gives the robot little to work with.
The cost shows in behaviour as well. People scan pages rather than read them, and links are where the eye stops. A paragraph with three blue «here» words gives the scanner nothing to choose from; «bag filter specifications» tells them in two seconds whether to click. A grid of cards where every button says «Details» makes the reader look around each link to understand it.
The damage reaches beyond search. Screen readers let users call up a list of all links on a page and jump between them. Out of context, that list reads «read more, read more, read more, here, details». WCAG makes link purpose a Level A requirement (success criterion 2.4.4): the purpose of each link must be clear from its text or its context. Accessibility audits flag generic anchors, and in markets where web accessibility is regulated, that makes them a compliance issue, not a matter of style.
There is also a loss of control. When the anchor says nothing, search engines use whatever else they can find. Google states that for an image link it uses the image’s alt text as the anchor, and that it can fall back to the title attribute if a link is empty. If the alt is empty as well, the link carries no text at all.
AI-driven search adds another layer. AI assistants and answer engines that read pages to answer questions see links much as a screen reader does: as text without the visual layout around it. A descriptive anchor tells them what the linked page covers; «read more» tells them only that there is more.
WHY THIS MISTAKE KEEPS HAPPENING
Templates decide. Ready-made 1С-Bitrix solutions, WordPress themes and page builders print a «Read more» button under every preview and a «Details» button on every product tile. The label sits in a template, editors never see it, and nobody changes it.
Designers draw buttons, not links. In a mockup, a card is a picture, a headline and a button with a short label that fits its width. Whether the headline is also clickable is rarely specified, so the developer makes only the button a link.
Sometimes the button is not a link at all. Cards made clickable with a script, or a <div> with an onclick handler, look like links to users but not to crawlers. Google says it can reliably follow only <a> elements with an href attribute.
People write the way they speak. «You can download the price list here» is natural speech. When the editor adds the link, they highlight the shortest word next to it.
Fear of over-optimisation. Some editors avoid naming the page in the anchor because they have heard that keyword-rich anchors are dangerous. That warning concerns manipulative external links: Google’s spam policies list links with optimised anchor text in articles and press releases distributed on other sites. A link from your own category to your own product, named after that product, is a different thing.
And nobody owns the links. Copywriters write the text, designers draw the cards, developers build the templates. The style guide covers headings and tone of voice and says nothing about link text.
THE MOST COMMON FORMS IN PRACTICE
The «Read more» feed. Blog and news lists where every preview ends with the same link, and the headline is not clickable.
The «Details» catalogue. Product cards where the button is the only link to the product page. Forty products on a page, forty identical anchors.
The «here» in body text. «The price list for bag filters can be downloaded here.» The one word that carries the link is the one word that says nothing.
The chained links. «We covered filter selection in this, this and this article», with each «this» linked to a different page. Three links, no context for any of them.
The naked URL. Pasted addresses as the visible text, sometimes with UTM tags or filter parameters: /catalog/bag-filters/?PAGEN_1=2&sort=price.
The silent image. Banners, brand logos and category tiles built as images with an empty alt. The links exist for the crawler but carry no text.
The download wall. A page of certificates and datasheets where every link says «Download» or «PDF». Twelve files, one anchor.
HOW TO FIX IT
Start with an export, not with rewriting. Crawl the site and export every internal link with its source URL, target URL, anchor text and type (text or image). Group the links by anchor. If «Read more», «Details» and «here» are in the top ten, the templates are the cause. Then group by target: for each key page, list every anchor that points to it. A main category linked only through the menu and through «here» has almost no descriptive internal links.
Fix the templates first. One change in a list template fixes thousands of links at once:
- Make the headline of every preview and the name of every product a link to the same URL as the button.
- If the design keeps a generic button, add the context as visually hidden text: «Read more<span class=»visually-hidden»> about bag filter FRM-200</span>». The hidden part is still part of the link text in the HTML. An aria-label helps screen readers, but its effect on search is not documented, so do not rely on it for SEO.
- Make buttons real links: <a href>, not a script.
- Give every image link an alt that names its destination: «Bag filters», not «banner-1» or nothing.
In 1С-Bitrix the button labels usually live in the component template or its language file, so the fix is a template edit, not content work.
Rewrite body text where it pays. Main categories, key product lines, service pages and top articles: find every in-text link to them and make the anchor name the target. «Download the bag filter price list», not «Download it here». Google suggests a simple test: read the anchor on its own, and if you cannot tell what the page is about, add words.
Do not overcorrect. The opposite mistake is cramming keywords into every link: «buy polyester bag filters wholesale cheap Moscow». Google’s guidance warns against keyword stuffing in anchors. Keep anchors to a few words, vary them naturally (the product name, the category, what the page offers), and leave context around each link instead of chaining them.
Change the process. Add link rules to the editorial style guide: no «here», «read more» or pasted URLs as anchors; the anchor names the destination. Review link text in templates at the design stage, not after launch. After each redesign or template change, re-crawl the site and compare the anchor report with the previous one.
HOW TO CHECK IF YOU HAVE THIS PROBLEM
Crawl the site. Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) exports every link with its anchor through Bulk Export → Links → All Inlinks. Netpeak Spider, Sitebulb and the site audits in Ahrefs and Semrush can export internal links with their anchors too. Sort by anchor and count what share of the links to your key pages use generic text.
Run Lighthouse, and read it carefully. The SEO section of Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools has an audit called «Links do not have descriptive text». Its word list covers English and several other languages, but not Russian: «read more» fails, «подробнее» passes. On a Russian site a green result in that audit proves nothing.
Listen to the page. Open a key page with a screen reader and call up its list of links (NVDA+F7 in NVDA, the rotor in VoiceOver). That is how the page sounds to someone who navigates by links.
Count the product links. Pick three category pages and check their outlinks in the crawler: how many links to products carry the product name, and how many carry only «Details».
And the simplest check of all: take your most important commercial page, copy every link text from it into one column, in order, and hide everything else. If you cannot tell where each link leads, neither can the search engine, and neither can the person deciding where to click next.