# Link best practices

> Google can generally only crawl links that are anchor elements with an href; JavaScript-only links may not be followed. Anchor text should be descriptive, concise and relevant. Every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site, and there is no ideal number of links per page.

- URL: https://geo.casa/content-structured-data/link-best-practices/
- Reference · Officially documented
- Reviewed: 2026-10-25

## Make links crawlable

> **Officially documented:**
> "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.
>
> Sources: [Google Search Central: SEO link best practices for Google](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable)

```html
<!-- 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

> **Officially documented:**
> 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.
>
> Sources: [Google Search Central: SEO link best practices for Google](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable)

## Link to every page you care about

> **Officially documented:**
> "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.
>
> Sources: [Google Search Central: SEO link best practices for Google](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable)

## 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.

## Sources

- [Google Search Central: SEO link best practices for Google](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable)