[hn_throwaway_99]

Agreed, and I think a lot of his reasoning falls apart if you look at his specific examples:

> What will I see if I click a link labeled "click here"? I have no idea. Instead, choose link text that describes the destination.

Pretty much all of the examples are of the form of "To do action XYZ, click here". Why aren't you considering the "do action XYZ" part of the sentence?

> It confuses search engines

No, it doesn't. As he said previously, "this is not 1995" - search engines also take into account the context around links and images.

Most importantly, though, these are all just this guy's feelings. While I think A/B tests definitely have limitations, this type of small change is the kind of thing that can absolutely be probed scientifically (i.e. A/B tests, formal user studies, etc.) If you're in a company where people are strongly arguing one side or the other of this debate, I'd just use the famous quote by Jim Barksdale: "If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine."