The New Best Practices for Links in SEO

Google has authenticated SEO link-building best practices in their developer docs for search and SEO. It was originally a document about how to create crawlable links, but changes have been made to also make the links themselves crawlable. Internal links within your content

• Anchor text placements
• How to write good anchor text
• External links from other sites

Crawlable links

The first section is one of the advanced link-building strategies in SEO that can be seen on the Way Back Machine. The new document reads as follows: “Google will be able to crawl your link if it is an HTML element that is also referred to as an anchor element with ahref attribute.

The links and other attributes would not be appraised and extracted by Google crawler. Google cannot reliably get URLs from (a) elements without ahref attribute or from other tags that behave as links because of script events. There are advanced link-building strategies in SEO that Google cannot appraise.

Anchor text placement

Google says that anchor text, also referred to as link text, is the visible text in a link. This text informs both Google and the public about the page you are linking to. The anchor text must be positioned between (a) items that Google can crawl.

Google also provides examples of good and badly written placement anchor text.

Writing anchor text

This is another advanced link-building strategy in SEO that Google can adopt. According to Google, anchor text is descriptive, relevant, and reasonably concise for the page that is on it and for the page it links to. This is known to provide context to the link and set up expectations for the readers.

The better you are able to use anchor text, the easier it is for a user to navigate your site and understand what the page you are linking to is all about.

Internal links

Google is of the opinion that there is no specific number of links that you need and that this requires writing. There may be a thought in the back of your mind about linking in terms of pointing to external websites. It’s important to pay attention to the anchor text used for external connections since this might make your site easier for users and Google to understand. It enables you to find other pages on the website.

Think about the resources on your site that enable users to understand a given page on your website and link to those pages in context.

External links

Google considers the trust factor of links to be helpful in advanced link-building strategies in SEO. This gives an idea about the sites where you can establish links and use the no-follow approach for spammy links, and it is about paid links as well.

Google is of the opinion that linking to other websites is something that you should not be scared of. In a way, external links can establish trustworthiness. Citing your sources is one example. Where it makes sense, you should connect to external websites and give readers a description of what to expect.

To conclude, SEO and link-building services are obsessed with links. It is the right approach as they are an important factor for most search engines. So anything that is published by Google has to be read by the SEOs for them to make decisions on how to manage the link-building and management activities.