Hello support,
Trying to optimize for SEO, I face an issue that has quite a serious impact on SEO weight as shown below:
The so called identical anchor text is mainly caused by the “view post” anchor on images on the blog page:
Since this is a part of x-theme, do you have a solution or suggestion to solve this?
Hi @ruudvanbeek,
Thanks for reaching out.
You mean it should be similar to like View Post 1, View Post 2, and so on? But the text is merely a graphical label for the thumbnail, like what’s on the grid covers. Even carousel and sliders use links with similar texts. And adding View Post without a link isn’t so functional.
Please check these https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/74718/repeated-anchor-text-while-internal-linking-for-seo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ.
Another sample that uses the same texts are link buttons, read more, and so on (same texts for different links), the only difference with that setup is that it has a background image instead of an image look.
It shouldn’t have any issue with SEO, may I know what tools you’ve used analyzing it?
Thanks!
Hi Rad,
Thanks for the link, it is quite similar as the current issue.
Your suggestion might result in the opposite; repeating “view post” in View Post 1 etc. means repeating a large part of the anchor which is also considered bad practice…
A similar issue comes up when items / products are paged. Page 1, Page 2 etc also get negative SEO points. We tried to avoid these as much as possible by setting a large page size as of 25-30 items. On slower connections this might even bring the opposite effect.
Leaving out the text is also very bad practice and costs quite some SEO points. We have been testing and working with several SEO tools. They all seem to take similar issues into consideration. Currently we are using https://www.seobility.net/ which has quite good to-the-point details as to where to find the presented issues.
How to fix is up to the user… hence my posting here.
I have been thinking to use 10-15 characters of the blog-item title, not even sure if that would be acceptable though. As how to implement such is another challenge.
Hi @ruudvanbeek,
I see, then I’ll forward this to our team for further research regarding this topic to see if there’s anything we should do differently.
And changing those texts would require custom development, changing test is easy but making them unique from each other is complex. It would need its own counter, I recommend consulting it to a developer for proper implementation.
But personally, most of the tool doesn’t see it the way the actual search engines sees it. My provided video is from Google Webmaster as well. And I don’t see google tools complaining about this error too.
Thanks, and again we’ll look into this. Cheers!
Thanks for forwarding the issue, hopefully someone gets a brilliant idea as how to solve these issues.
I partially agree, google webmaster tools don’t exactly complain. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that it is “fully ok with google” Google is simply not very open about their “detailed rules of engagement”. 3rd parties fiddle with all kind of set-ups to find what works best or gets punishments.
Not saying the 3rd parties are always correct, but there is quite some distance between google complaining and google liking. And linking is exactly what all SEO is about as I understand it.
Thanks again and I just hope for some magic to be implemented in coming versions.
Whishing you all the best for the new year!
You’re most welcome, we’ll look into this and maybe get more information from the experts. It’s all just based on my personal opinion 
Thanks and Happy New year!
Hello @Rad
Not trying to spam you, but please add the below to the same list.
Researching this, it turns out that all blog items create 2 empty anchor text links.These are the 2 arrows as shown below.
So, having 23 empty anchors times 35 points gets us > 800 negative points… Only for 2 arrows on every blog item.
Since the above also applies to blog items as the items before, it seems to me that the structure of blog pages would deserve a makeover. If such a makeover is considered, more flexibility and adjustability would be also high on my wish-list.
Thanks for giving further feedback.
Hi @ruudvanbeek,
Noted that and we’ll check that too, but I have a question too. May I know how your tools deal with read-more feature of the blog? It’s the same text used for multiple URLs and it’s been around since the blog came to be. I just like to find out if they do exceptions based on what text is displayed.
Thanks!
Hello @Rad,
Yes, you are correct we have used the read-more (created by ourselves, not the theme) anchors in the past and changed them to “sentence parts” from the linked items. Our SEO tool was definitely not liking the read-more anchors as they also create duplicates.
Within the blog items we currently use do not show any “read-more” anchors. The previously mentioned view-post is an issue and probably a replacement of the read-more anchor?
We are still working at SEO the next period. If other theme SEO issues turn up, I will update this support item.
in addition:
Woocommerce product pages also produce the same previous / next arrows:
As also do portfolio items:
Hi @ruudvanbeek,
Sure, please provide your findings and I’ll be forwarding it to get more opinions and inputs
And thanks about the information about read more, so you mean the tools is strict that there should be no duplicate texts? The view post acts as read-more so I thought the same rule apply on that that feature too. And it’s the same as how feature image works but in Ethos, but with text and the main purpose is navigation like read-more.
About the arrow, they are graphical navigations which shouldn’t have any negative effect in SEO but noted that as well.
Thanks!
Hello @Rad
Yes to the “no duplicates”. As far as I understand Google “demands” all texts to be original. This sounds simple but it really is not. Imagine we sell many products in series which differ only on details with each other. Now write original good SEO texts for all of them WITHOUT duplicating text…
I’m far from an SEO expert, but from my point of view once you have a new website built, you only have “structural work of a house”. As most builders know, finishing the house is 3-4 times more work then structural. This also implies to SEO in my opinion. Once you have a (technically) good working website, the real work starts 
And this is definitely NOT my favorite work.
Hi @ruudvanbeek,
I’m sorry for the delay getting back to you here. To confirm, we’ve consulted SEO experts when building X originally. I’ve also recently reached out to one of our experts for some advice on this particular issue. What we’ve concluded is that when it comes to sub-navigational elements like pagination and linking around on the same site to different articles, you’re not going to have SEO penalties. Google is used to seeing things like “View Post” within a site. For example, what if you placed the same pagination links at the top and bottom of a page for convenience to users? You could have duplicate link text in that scenario as well.
This is quite a different story if you are linking out to another site. In that case you would want to use descriptive text.
At this point we don’t have plans to add ways to customize this in the theme directly. If this is going to be an issue for you, there are ways to modify the theme through custom development. You could use a child theme to override the theme markup. This would be outside the scope of support we can offer, but if there’s anything specific you want to start modifying we could point you in the right direction.