Generic Anchor Text Example: "Click Here"

Generic anchor text is the small phrase that tells a reader to click but not why. Think of click here, read more, or learn more. Blog templates print it after every excerpt. Editors type it out of habit. Calls to action in ads get copied into pages, and a whole list of cards may end up with the same two words on every link. None of that breaks the page, and the links all still work.

Screen reader users often pull up a list of all the links on a page. A list that says "read more" twenty times is no help. WCAG asks that a link's purpose be clear from its text or from its context. Generic text can pass in context, but it forces people to hunt around. Sighted users skim links too. Clear words are what catch the eye as someone scans the page.

Search engines use anchor text as a clue about the linked page. Google's link guidance asks for text that is descriptive and reasonably short. A link that says "here" carries no such clue. One or two will do no harm. But when a site's main path to a page uses only generic text, it gives up useful context. Exact-match keywords in every link are not the answer either, since that reads like spam.

To detect the issue, list all anchor text in a crawl, normalize it, and count it by phrase. Match the whole phrase, so longer text is not caught by mistake. To fix it, write the link as if the reader will see nothing else. Change "click here for pricing" to "see our pricing." For card templates, use the title as the link. If a design needs "read more," add an aria-label that starts with those visible words and then names the article.