A crawler is a search engine tool which finds webpages to navigate through. Search engines can discover pages more easily when the href attribute of an anchor element is present, and contains a crawlable hyperlink.
Lighthouse flags anchor elements with uncrawlable hyperlinks:
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Lighthouse flags the following anchor elements as being uncrawlable:
<a>An anchor element without a href attribute</a><a href>An anchor element with a href attribute that has no attribute value</a><a href="">An anchor element which has an empty string href attribute value</a><a href="file:///image.png">An anchor element with file URI for the href attribute value</a><a href="#">An anchor element with a single hash symbol as the href attribute value</a><a href="javascript:void(0)">An anchor element with a JavaScript URI for the href attribute value</a>
Examples include:
<a href="https://example.com"><a href="/relative-link"><a href="#contact-us">
A search engine crawler may not always execute JavaScript event listeners, so ensure anchor elements do not require JavaScript to function correctly. Instead of markup such as:
<a onclick="purchaseItem();">
Consider using an alternative HTML element such as a <button> element.
The name attribute on the a element is obsolete. Consider putting an id attribute on the nearest container instead.
Instead of using a name attribute on an anchor element: <a name="top-of-page">, you can instead use an ID attribute which can be linked to as normal:
<header id="top-of-page">...</header>
<a href="#top-of-page">Back to top</a>- Make your links crawlable
- Source code for the anchor href audit - this link needs updating when the pull request is merged