This Is How Googlebot Determines The Links To Follow
- 16 May, 2018
- Jason Ferry
- Googlebot
Web crawling is one of the most important things that every SEO specialist and webmaster should fully understand. And at the recently held Google I/O, Google presented which link types Google will and will not follow when crawling websites. Aside from “a href”, they also tackled other types of links.
Google discussed the use of JavaScript on-click attribute within links. Utilising this posed some problems to SEO companies and website owners. Some of them have acceptable reasons for using this when creating links on a website, such as for tracking and design purposes. However, since Googlebot does not process or follow all link types, this can result in some crawling issues. This is most notable for sites that possess problematic links and lack an effective sitemap for it.
In order to find links, Googlebot analyses anchor tags with href attributes, and nothing more. So for example, you can use JavaScript with the history API as long as you utilise anchor tags with href attributes. A lot of search crawlers like Google will not perform a simulation of a page to look for links. When linking, the only ones that will be followed are anchor tags.
This SEO information was gathered from https://www.thesempost.com/google-types-links-googlebot-follows/. To learn more, click here.
A professional SEO agency can provide assistance when it comes to website optimisation, and it doesn’t deal with crawlers alone. Take a look at our website where we discuss these things further.