Indexing & crawlability
Links Googlebot cannot follow
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on a whole site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Serious. Can stop pages from appearing in Google, or from working for visitors. Fix these first.
- Based on
- Google's own documentation
What is wrong
Your website contains links that Google's crawler cannot follow. This happens when links are built with JavaScript or other code that only runs in a browser, rather than as standard HTML links that any automated visitor can see. Google's crawler reads your page's raw HTML code, and if the link isn't there in that basic form, the crawler cannot detect it.
Why it costs you
When Google cannot follow a link, it cannot discover the page that link points to. Those pages stay hidden from Google's search index, which means they won't appear in search results at all, no matter how good the content is. Visitors cannot find them through Google, and you lose any traffic or business they might generate.
How to fix it
Convert your links to standard HTML. In your page template or HTML, use `<a href="URL">link text</a>` instead of JavaScript-generated links. If you use a framework that renders links in JavaScript, check its documentation for how to output static HTML links instead. If you must keep JavaScript links for some reason, add an XML sitemap listing the URLs you want indexed, so Google knows to crawl them even if it cannot follow the links on the page itself.
What the audit tests
- No link tag swaps its address for a framework attribute such as routerlink
- No address (href) sits on a span, div or button instead of a link
- No link hides its destination inside a javascript: address
- No link tag without an address navigates through a click script
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