Links: Pages With Uncrawlable Internal Outlinks

Pages that contain internal links that are not in an <a> tag with an href attribute.

Other formats might not be seen as followed links and cannot be relied upon for discovery, indexing or passing PageRank.

Google specfify –

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.

Please note – Our research indicates the above is not strictly true. Google will crawl anything in the HTML that looks like a link. They will attempt to parse it and use for discovery. Therefore, many of these link types will likely be ‘crawlable’.

However they are not recommended, and should not be relied upon. They might not be treated in the same way as a recommended hyperlink for passing link signals.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

To populate this filter ‘Store’ for ‘Uncrawlable Links’ must be enabled in ‘Config > Spider > Crawl’ in the page links section.

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Links’ tab and ‘Pages With Uncrawlable Internal Outlinks’ filter and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Uncrawlable outlinks can be seen in the lower ‘Outlinks’ tab with the ‘Link Crawlability’ column filtered to ‘Uncrawlable’.

Export in bulk via ‘Bulk Export > Links > Pages With Uncrawlable Internal Outlinks’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when pages have an internal outlink that is an uncrawlable link type.

Uncrawlable link types include –

<span href="https://example.com">
<div href="https://example.com">
<a onclick="goto('https://example.com')">
<a href="javascript:goTo('products')">

How To Fix

Review the format of link types on the page and use an <a> tag with an href attribute for important links to ensure they are followed correctly.

Please review Google’s documentation on creating crawlable links.