Link best practices

Make links crawlable

“Generally, Google can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element … with an href attribute.” Most links in other formats won’t be extracted. Google can’t reliably extract URLs from <a> elements without an href attribute. The same goes for other tags that act as links through script events.

Officially documented · Google Search Central

<!-- Crawlable -->
<a href="/robots-txt/">robots.txt reference</a>

<!-- Not reliably crawlable -->
<span onclick="go('/robots-txt/')">robots.txt reference</span>
<a href="javascript:goTo('robots')">robots.txt reference</a>

Write good anchor text

Anchor text is the visible text of a link. It tells people and Google something about the page it points to. Good anchor text “is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to.” If JavaScript inserts anchor text, check that it is present in the rendered HTML.

Officially documented · Google Search Central

Link to every page you care about

“Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.” Google says there is no ideal number of links a page should contain.

Officially documented · Google Search Central

How this wiki does it

Every link between entries is a plain <a href> in the server-rendered HTML, with the target entry’s title as anchor text. Every entry is linked from its topic hub, its topic’s sidebar and the A–Z index. Most are also linked from related entries, so no published page is an orphan.