I have been seeing quite a bit of discussion recently about whether Google is following links without the a <href tag>, essentially meaning the links are only textual, not hyperlinks. It’s unlikely that this could have any major influence on search engine optimisation, or performance, but I thought it would be interesting to cover how intelligent Googlebot has become in regards to interpreting text on a webpage.
So, can Google follow URLs without hyperlinks?
The answer is yes, and it appears they have been doing this for some time now. The problem was first noticed when people started noticing a spike in “Not Found” errors in their Webmaster Tools accounts. Google had been listing a lot of new links as 404s, and the common theme about these links is that they were truncated, and appended with “…”
For example, a full link to your site might be:
https://www.example.com/examples-are-great/index.php/tag/examples-are-boss/
However, when truncated it might become:
https://www.example.com/examples-are-gr…
This might be the case if the link is scraped and indexed by a low-quality spammy link page. These low-quality web pages that rely on scraped content often show two versions of a link, one is a fully clickable URL, the other is a non-functioning text-form of the link. You can see this in the image below, taken from one of these anonymous low quality sites:
Although the top link is truncated, it is still has the <a href> tag, taking the search engine bot to the correct destination of the URL, however, the second link is text-only, so therefore the truncation makes it completely redundant. It is these non-clickable links that are often responsible for the increased quantity of 404 errors in Webmaster Tools.
It seems that Google are actually following links in text without the <a href> tag, think of it as how they treat links in PDF’s, text files, or JavaScript. If Googlebot sees text that looks like a link, it will attempt to follow it regardless of whether it is a hyperlink or not. If this link is truncated with the “…” appendage, it will be useless and a 404 will be returned to WMT, however, if it is a full link then they will follow it to the destination. This is not really a big surprise for me, Google love finding new content, and identifying text that looks like a link will give them a chance to cover as many possible sources of URLs as possible.
In relation to the 404 errors that are being returned to WMT, I think the best option is to just ignore them. Webmaster Tools now gives you the option to view the domains that are creating the 404 error, so if you notice it’s the non-clickable links causing the problem you can just mark them as fixed, using a new WMT feature. Google have stated that, in general, a 404 is no problem for them, and having any 404s listed in WMT will not affect crawling, indexing or ranking. Admittedly, the clutter this can cause in WMT can be infuriating, and you think Google would just discount truncated text-only links as soon as they follow them off-site rather than returning a 404, but hey, Googlebot is far from perfect!
The issue now being debated is how much value, if any, do these non-clickable links have. The most plausible argument, and one I subscribe to myself, is that it depends on the context in which the link is found. For example, if found in structured directories they might be regarded similarly to ‘social citations’. This means they are nowhere near as valuable as hyperlinks, nor would they be as authoritative as, say, the local citations that are found in trusted local directories, for example. However, if they are found in non-structured directories (blog comments, for example), they might not be counted at all, and if they are, value would likely be determined similarly to a social mention, with emphasis placed on the quality of the source. So, if it’s the non-clickable links is found on a really old, moderated blog with loads of other spammy links, it is unlikely to pass any value at all.
So, hopefully that will answer any questions you have about how Google are treating URLs without hyperlinks, and it might explain away any increases in 404s you’ve noticed in WMT. Still, if you have any further questions don’t hesitate to drop us a comment.
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
