Excessively long anchor text: what it is, why it matters, and how to fix it

One or more links have extremely long anchor text (over 100 characters). Very long anchor text dilutes the keyword signal and may appear unnatural to search engines.

Search engines use anchor text to understand the topic of the linked page. Excessively long anchor text dilutes the keyword signal and may appear as an attempt to stuff keywords into links. Concise, focused anchor text is more effective at conveying relevance signals.

Shorten anchor text to be concise and descriptive, ideally under 60 characters. Focus on the primary keyword or a brief descriptive phrase that accurately represents the linked page's content.

This is a low-severity issue: a polish item. Fix it in batches during scheduled maintenance; the win is cumulative quality, not a step change. It belongs to the internal_links family of checks.

Run a free Dr Urls audit: it crawls your site, detects excessively long anchor text on every affected page, shows example URLs, and generates a ready-to-use fix task. Re-scan after fixing to verify the issue is gone.