Do your internal links say what they point at?
The text of a link tells a crawler what the destination is about. "Click here" tells it nothing, and one phrase pointing at several pages tells it the wrong thing. This reads your internal link text from outside your network.
Reads the internal links on a sample of your pages and the text of each. Nothing is stored.
How this check works
Shipwork crawls a sample of your pages, extracts every internal link with its text, and reports generic text ("click here", "read more"), links with no text, and phrases that point at several different pages — the three ways internal link text stops helping a crawler.
Questions
- Does anchor text still matter?
- Yes, though less than it once did. The text of an internal link is a strong hint to a crawler about what the target page is about, and it helps users decide what to click.
- Why is "click here" bad?
- It gives the crawler no topic for the target, and screen-reader users navigating by links hear only "click here" repeated. A descriptive phrase fixes both.
- What is a conflicting anchor?
- The same phrase used for several different pages. It tells the crawler those pages are about the same thing, which they are not, so the signal is muddled.