UI controls marked up as links

What is wrong

Your website has HTML elements that look like clickable buttons or controls but are marked up as links in the page code. This happens when a `<a>` tag is used for interactive elements that should be `<button>` tags instead—for example, a "Load more results" button or a dropdown menu trigger that runs JavaScript rather than navigating to a new page.

Why it costs you

Google's crawler may treat these as navigation links and try to follow them, which wastes crawl time on interactions that don't lead to new pages. More importantly, screen readers and other assistive technology will announce them incorrectly, and keyboard users may struggle to interact with them. This reduces usability for people with disabilities and confuses search engines about your site's actual link structure.

How to fix it

To fix this, audit your interactive controls and replace `<a>` tags with `<button>` tags where appropriate. If the element performs an action (opens a menu, loads more content, submits a form) rather than navigating somewhere, it should be a `<button>`. Make the change in your page templates or component library so you fix all instances at once rather than one page at a time. Add CSS to style buttons to match your design if needed, but keep the correct HTML element underneath.