SiteAud!tLint Support

Opportunity Internal Linking

Internal links without anchor text

Severity
Opportunity
Impact
Low
Effort to fix
Low
Issue code
anchor_empty

Why it matters

Links with no text and no image alt text give no context about the target page.

How to fix it

Add descriptive link text, or alt text to linked images.

What this means

The page has internal links with no anchor text at all. The evidence shows how many and one target, for example 2 link(s), e.g. to /cart.

For a link wrapped around an image, SiteAud!tLint uses the image's alt text as the anchor. So an image link is only flagged when the image has no alt text, or an empty one.

Why it matters

  • Search engines get no description of the linked page from these links.
  • Screen readers announce them as just "link", or read out the URL, so visitors cannot tell where they lead. This fails WCAG.

Common causes

  • Icon links: social icons, a cart icon, a search icon or a logo, made with an icon font, an inline SVG, or a CSS background image.
  • Image links where the image has no alt text, such as product thumbnails or banner images.
  • Empty links left by a page builder or an editor, sometimes with nothing visible at all.
  • Card layouts where a link wraps a whole card but contains only a background image.

How to fix it

  1. Image links: add alt text that describes the destination, for example alt="Trail running shoes" on a category thumbnail. See Images missing alt attribute.
  2. Icon links: add an aria-label to the link, such as <a href="/cart" aria-label="Shopping cart">, or visually hidden text inside it. Note that search engines may not use aria-label as anchor text, so for important pages also link from descriptive text elsewhere.
  3. The logo link: give the logo image alt text with your brand name.
  4. Empty leftover links: delete them.

Verify the fix

Recrawl. Fixes to a header or footer icon clear the issue on every page at once. See also Non-descriptive anchor text.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the Internal Linking score 0.5 points, plus up to 4 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. A smaller improvement with a modest effect on its own.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick Internal links without anchor text. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (low) and effort (low), and in the issues CSV under the code anchor_empty. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.

Guides that cover this issue