Internal Link with empty Anchor Text

Links with no visible text give Google no anchor-text signal and are invisible to screen readers.

Why it matters

Links with no visible text give Google no anchor-text signal and are invisible to screen readers. Icon-only links need accessible names to be usable.

Address when convenient — notices usually mark a polish opportunity rather than a defect. Estimated SEO impact: medium — measurable effect on click-through or relevance.

How to fix

• Add descriptive visible text inside the link
• For icon links, add aria-label="..." with a meaningful value
• Or wrap with a visually-hidden span (sr-only) containing the label

Common causes

If the rule is firing across many pages, the root cause is almost always one of these:

• Pages reachable only through search, sitemap, or external links — never from another internal page.
• Deep section pages buried 5+ clicks from the homepage with no shortcut hub.
• Important pages weakly linked because the navigation never surfaces them.
• Broken internal targets after a slug or section rename without a redirect map.

Anti-patterns to avoid

Even with the best intentions, these "fixes" make the issue worse — recognise them so you don't ship them:

• Hub pages only reachable via the sitemap, not from any header or body link.
• Pagination depth so high that ?page=42 is the only way to reach important content.
• Renaming sections without adding redirects.

How atlookup detects this

Our crawler renders each page with a real headless browser, then builds a graph of internal links across the entire crawl and analyses orphans, depth, and weak nodes. Pages where the rule fires for internal link with empty anchor text are flagged on the report.

If you'd like to see this rule fire on your own site, run a free 60-second audit — every page is reported with the exact lines that triggered it.

Tools to verify the fix

Once you've applied the fix, double-check with these external validators:

• Screaming Frog — Crawl-depth + orphan-page reports.
• Sitebulb — Visual graph of internal link weight distribution.

Frequently asked questions

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