Crawlable link
A link Google can follow to find another page, which generally means an HTML a element with an href attribute pointing to a real web address.
Google uses links to judge how relevant pages are and to find new pages to crawl (Google Search Central). In its words, “Generally, Google can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element (also known as anchor element) with an href attribute.”
Links in most other formats won’t be parsed, and Google can’t reliably pull URLs from <a> elements without an href, or from tags that act as links through script events. A link JavaScript adds to the page still counts, as long as it uses the same <a href> markup.
What Google can and can’t follow
Google can parse an <a> tag with an href attribute, such as one pointing to /products/category/shoes, even with an onclick or a class added. It recommends against <span href="...">, <a onclick="goto(...)"> and an href that starts with javascript:, though it may still try to parse them. The URL in the href should resolve to a real web address Google can request, such as /products or /products.php?id=123.
Why it matters for a store
If your menus, filters or “load more” buttons only work through scripts, Google may not find the product and category pages behind them. Google’s page also covers the text inside the link: put descriptive anchor text between the <a> tags, and for an image used as a link Google reads the image’s alt text as the anchor text. To see whether links added by JavaScript are present, Google points to the URL Inspection tool.
Related terms
Tools for it
Sources
Updated Oct 14, 2026.