Finding links without descriptive text

Question

Through a few Lighthouse tests I was alerted to some links without descriptive text on one of our pages. These links had text such as "Read More" or "click here" and Google flagged this as being an SEO issue. I suspect there are probably many more links such as these across this site.

Is there a way via Screaming Frog or other tool to crawl a site for links such as these?

So far Lighthouse seems to be the only tool that explicitly reports on this and I can't seem to find a definitive list of problematic link text that Google might deem as unacceptable to plug into Screaming Frog.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Is there a way via Screaming Frog or other tool to crawl a site for links such as these?

The Custom Extraction in Screaming Frog should be able to do that.

I can't seem to find a definitive list of problematic link text that Google might deem as unacceptable

According to the link you provided yourself, this is the list:

• click here
• click this
• go
• here
• this
• start
• right here
• more
• learn more

When I talked to an ex-Googler a few days ago, they confirmed that this audit is only doing a very basic check against a static list that is mainly (only?) in English.

problematic link text that Google might deem as unacceptable

Please do not confuse Lighthouse Audits from the Chrome team with rankings by the Google search engine. You will not get any kind of penalty or disadvantage for using such anchor texts. Right now, you are simply not getting the most out of your internal links. And I would encourage you to use proper link texts. But do not expect massive gains from this. Lighthouse is just an audit - not a must-do list for SEO.