[SEO Audits] Anchors have descriptive text

[rviscomi]

Audit group: Content best practices
Description: Anchors have descriptive text
Failure description: {#} anchors do not have descriptive text
Help text: Descriptive anchor text is a useful signal to help search engines better understand your content. Avoid nondescript anchor text like “click here”.

Success conditions:

• No anchor’s textValue is included in the blacklist below; otherwise
  • Anchor has a rel=“nofollow” attribute
  • Anchor's href value does not link to another page (eg "#", "javascript:void(0);")

Blacklist:

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

[paulirish]

How about

More
Learn more

[rviscomi]

"More" and "Learn more" SGTM. Added to the blacklist.

I've also added a custom metric in HTTP Archive that will be collecting anchor textValues so we could run some analysis to find the most commonly used invalid values. That should be available in a few days when the September 1 crawl is complete.

Anecdotally, <a href="#">More</a> seems to be a common way to show truncated content. I wouldn't consider that a failure case for this audit since the href is not linking to another document. I added a requirement to the audit's success condition so that anchors with self-referential href values are excluded.

[robdodson]

Anecdotally, More seems to be a common way to show truncated content. I wouldn't consider that a failure case for this audit since the href is not linking to another document

I'm not sure if we're testing it yet, but it should be an accessibility failure. Opening the screen reader links menu and just seeing "More, More, More" is not useful.