Google publishes new link best practices - Search Engine Land

Google has published a new link best practices in their SEO and search developer documentation. Originally it was a document about how to create crawlable links, but the document has been to include not just how to make links crawlable but also:

• Anchor text placements
• How to write good anchor text
• Internal links within your content
• External links from other sites

Crawlable links

The first section is very similar to the original document, which you can see on the Wayback Machine. The new document now reads, “Generally, Google can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element (also known as anchor element) with an href attribute. Most links in other formats won’t be parsed and extracted by Google’s crawlers. Google can’t reliably extract URLs from <a> elements that don’t have an href attribute or other tags that perform as links because of script events. Here are examples of links that Google can and can’t parse:”

Anchor text placement

Google said, “Anchor text (also known as link text) is the visible text of a link. This text tells people and Google something about the page you’re linking to. Place anchor text between <a> elements that Google can crawl.”

Google also provides some examples of good and bad written placement anchor text.

Writing anchor text

This is another new section where Google wrote, “Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to. It provides context for the...

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