Link Best Practices for Google

Link Best Practices for Google

Google uses links as a key signal when determining the relevancy of pages and discovering new pages to crawl. To improve your site’s visibility and understandability, it’s essential to ensure that your links are crawlable and that your anchor text is easy for both people and Google to comprehend.

Making Your Links Crawlable

As a rule of thumb, Google can typically only crawl your link if it’s an ‘a’ HTML element, also known as an anchor element, with an href attribute. Links formatted differently are generally not parsed and extracted by Google’s crawlers. URLs from ‘a’ features lacking an href attribute or other tags functioning as links due to script events, are not reliably extractable by Google.

Examples of links that Google can and can’t parse include:

Recommended (Google can parse):

• <a href=”https://example.com”>
• <a href=”/products/category/shoes”>

Links are also crawlable when you use JavaScript to insert them into a page dynamically, provided it uses the HTML markup shown above.

Not recommended (but Google may still attempt to parse this):

• <a routerLink=”products/category”>
• <span href=”https://example.com”>
• <a onclick=”goto(‘https://example.com’)”>

When you’re constructing your ‘a’ element, be sure that the URL embedded within it translates into a genuine web address (in other words, it resembles a URI) that Google’s crawlers can send requests to. For instance:

<a href="https://example.com">Visit our website</a>

This practice will help ensure your pages are discoverable by Google, enhancing your site’s SEO and user experience.