Internal links with no anchor text
anchor_empty_internalShort answer
Some internal links have no visible text — an empty <a>, an icon-only link, or an image link whose image has no alt. Google uses anchor text to understand what the linked page is about; with nothing there, the link passes less meaning. Give these links visible text, or describe the destination in the image's alt text.
Why it matters
Anchor text is one of the strongest on-site relevance signals for the target page. Empty anchors are common on logo links, icon buttons, card layouts where the whole image is linked, and "read more" arrows. Screen-reader users hear nothing useful either. Google uses the title attribute only as a fallback, so alt text on the image is the fix for image links.
How Glimana detects it
A site-level rule listing pages whose internal links have an empty anchor after reading link text, image alt and aria-label. Links to feeds (/feed/, .xml, .rss) are ignored because they are not pages.
How to fix it
- Find the affected pages in Glimana. Open Issues › Internal links with no anchor text. This is a site-level check, so the single row carries the full evidence: the URLs, values or days involved. The task under Tasks shows the same list and the expected gain.
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Apply the fix on your platform.
Logo link: set the site title as the logo image's alt (most themes do this; some leave it empty). Card layouts: make the card title the link, or add
aria-labelto the image link.Product cards: ensure
alt="{{ product.title }}"on linked images; icon links in the header needaria-label.Every
<a>needs an accessible name: text, an<img alt>, oraria-label. Avoid linking empty spans. -
Publish and clear caches. Save and publish, then make sure the crawler will see the new version: WordPress — clear the page cache in your cache plugin and purge the CDN; Shopify — theme and content changes go live on save, but purge any CDN in front of the store; custom code — deploy and purge the edge cache. Check in a private window or with
curl -s https://your-domain/page | grep -i '<title\|canonical\|robots'that the live HTML has changed; Glimana reads what the server sends, not what your browser has cached. - Verify in Glimana. Open the task under Tasks and click Mark as done. The affected pages are queued for a verification crawl within a few hours, and the task closes when no internal links on the affected pages lack anchor text. If the check still fails, the task returns to New with a note; when it passes, the task is listed under Resolved technical issues on Impact reports. To check sooner, use Re-crawl affected pages on the issue.
How the fix is verified
Re-crawl; the task closes when no internal links on the affected pages lack anchor text.