The fix, in one snippet
<!-- before --> <a href="/guides/arch-support">Read more</a>
<!-- after --> <a href="/guides/arch-support">How arch support actually works</a>Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
Every link's visible text is collected during the crawl and compared against a list of generic phrases: click here, read more, here, learn more, details, this page, download and similar. Links with no text at all, usually an image or an icon with no alternative text, are reported alongside them.
Why it matters
Anchor text is one of the oldest and most durable ranking signals, because it is a description of a page written by someone other than its author. "Running shoes for flat feet" pointing at a guide tells an engine what the guide covers; "read more" tells it nothing, and the signal is lost.
The accessibility cost is larger. Screen readers can list every link on a page as a navigation aid, and a list reading "read more, read more, read more, click here" is useless. WCAG 2.4.4 requires that a link's purpose be determinable from its text, or from its text plus its immediate context.
An empty link is worse again: it is announced as a URL, character by character.
How to fix it
Write the destination into the link text, and let the layout carry the "more" affordance:
<!-- before -->
<p>Our guide to arch support. <a href="/guides/arch-support">Read more</a></p>
<!-- after -->
<p><a href="/guides/arch-support">How arch support actually works</a></p>Where a design demands a short call to action, keep it visible and give assistive technology the full version with aria-label. For icon links, the accessible name is required: an aria-label or visually hidden text, not an empty anchor.
Where this fits
Generic or empty anchor text is check 5 of 7 that the seo & site health audit runs under links and site structure, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Pages with little internal link support (medium), where pages that almost nothing links to inherit almost no authority, however good they are. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
Generic or empty anchor text closes one route in. Immediately below it: Internal anchor text repetition, where every link to a page using the same words tells search engines one thing about it, repeatedly; Pages buried deep in the structure, where pages several clicks from the entry point are crawled less often and carry less internal authority.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error, and Duplicate body content, where two pages with identical body text are one page at two addresses, and search engines will pick one of them for you. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Generic or empty anchor text (low severity)
Scanner check id: seo-generic-link-textThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
Sign in with GoogleSigning in is free and takes one click. We store your email address and nothing else.