At Google’s I/O developer conference, Google’s John Mueller and Tom Greenway clarified that Googlebot won’t follow all links on a page. If your website uses JavaScript links, not all pages of your website might be indexed by Google. In general, your website should not rely on JavaScript.
Which links does Google index?
- <a href=”/good-link”>Will be crawled</a>
This is a regular a href link that will be crawled by Google.
- <span onclick=”changePage(‘bad-link’)”>Not crawled</span>
Google will not crawl this link because it is not an anchor.
- <a onclick=”changePage(‘bad-link’)”>Not crawled</a>
This link is in an anchor, but it does not use the href attribute. That’s why Google won’t crawl it.
- <a href=”/good-link” onclick=”changePage(‘good-link’)”>Will be crawled</a>
This link will be crawled by Google because it is an anchor with a href attribute.
Google only analyzes anchor tags with href atttributes. You can view the statement here:
How to check your links
Google’s Tom Greenway said in the presentation that links are some of the most important parts of the web. You can check the links on your website with the website audit tool in SEOprofiler. The Link Profiler tool and the other link building tools in SEOprofiler help you to improve the links that point to your site.
You can create your free account here:
