What are unoptimized anchors and how does Site Audit identify them?
Site Audit can check if your website has any “unoptimized anchors” by identifying hyperlinks that have unspecified anchor text such as:
- click here
- click this
- go here
- this
- start
- right here
- more
- learn more
- read more
- page
- article
- etc
In addition to these anchors in English, Site Audit can check for similarly unoptimized anchors in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Danish, Russian and Norwegian.
The reason we call anchor text “unoptimized” is because Google and other crawlers can actually learn more about your site through well-labelled hyperlinks. Google suggests itself that anchor text should provide “at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about.”
While this may sound like common sense, it can be an easy step to disregard in your content creation process. However, the extra minimal effort in writing clear anchor text can be worth it.
For anchor text best practices, Google also asks you to avoid the following:
- Avoid writing generic anchor text like "page", "article", or "click here".
- Avoid using text that is off-topic or has no relation to the content of the page linked to.
- Avoid using the page's URL as the anchor text in most cases, although there are certainly legitimate uses of this, such as promoting or referencing a new website's address.
So what are the best kinds of anchors?
Ultimately, the best anchors will be clear, concise, and descriptive. Your links should give a basic idea of what to expect before clicking so your visitors can understand the meaning of the linked-to page.
One simple way to make your anchors descriptive is to have them the same or very similar to the page title of the linked-to page.
For more best practices on how to optimize your anchor text, refer to the “Write good link text” section in Google’s SEO Starter Guide.
- What Issues Can Site Audit Identify?
- How many pages can I crawl in a Site Audit?
- Combien de temps faut-il pour explorer un site web ? Il semble que mon audit soit bloqué.
- Comment auditer un sous-domaine ?
- Can I manage the automatic Site Audit re-run schedule?
- Can I set up a custom re-crawl schedule?
- Comment le score de santé du site est-il calculé dans Audit de site ?
- How Does Site Audit Select Pages to Analyze for Core Web Vitals?
- How do you collect data to measure Core Web Vitals in Site Audit?
- Why is there a difference between GSC and Semrush Core Web Vitals data?
- Pourquoi seules quelques pages de mon site Web sont-elles explorées ?
- Pourquoi des pages actives de mon site web apparaissent-elles comme cassées ?
- Why can’t I find URLs from the Audit report on my website?
- Why does Semrush say I have duplicate content?
- Why does Semrush say I have an incorrect certificate?
- What are unoptimized anchors and how does Site Audit identify them?
- What do the Structured Data Markup Items in Site Audit Mean?
- Can I stop a current Site Audit crawl?
- How to Disable JS Rendering and Inspect a Page
- Configuration d’Audit de site
- Résolution des problèmes d’Audit de site
- Site Audit Overview Report
- Rapports thématiques dans Audit de site
- Reviewing Your Site Audit Issues
- Audit de site : rapport Pages explorées
- Site Audit Statistics
- Compare Crawls and Progress
- Exporting Site Audit Results
- Comment optimiser la vitesse d'exploration dans Audit de site ?
- Comment intégrer Zapier à Audit de site
- JS Impact Report