John Mueller from Google responded to the question of whether the search engine would crawl links in structured data. SEO depends on having links found, crawled, and then indexed, so any advantage of having more pages crawled would be beneficial.
What Purposes Does Google Serve With Links in Structured Data?
The questioner is curious as to whether Google uses links found in structured data for crawling.
They also want to know if Google stores the links rather than using them for crawling.
Here is the question:
“Does Google crawl URLs located in structured data markup or does Google just store the data?”
Google Attempts To Crawl A Variety Of URLs
Because Mueller mentions that Google may attempt to crawl a link that is contained within a text file, among other things, his response might come off as a little unexpected.
Another intriguing point is when he claims that Google will crawl anything that “looks” like a link and then provides examples of what that means.
Mueller’s answer:
“So for the most part, when we look at HTML pages, if we see something that looks like a link, we might go off and kind of like try that URL out as well.
That’s something where if we find a URL in JavaScript, we can try to pick that up and try to use it.
If we find a link in kind of a text file on a site, we can try to crawl that and use it.”
In terms of what Google might do with alternative links—that is, links that are not standard HTML hyperlinks with anchor text—response to Mueller’s is a pretty good overview.
Mueller then reminds the reader that none of these alternate link formats should be used in place of standard HTML hyperlinks, or what he refers to as a “regular link.”
If you want something that behaves like a link, Mueller highly advises utilizing a conventional HTML hyperlink.
He continued his answer:
“But it’s not really a normal link.
So it’s something where I would recommend if you want Google to go off and crawl that URL, make sure that there’s a natural HTML link to that URL, with a clear anchor text as well, that you give some information about the destination page.
If you don’t want Google to crawl that specific URL, then maybe block it with robots.txt or on that page use a rel=canonical pointing to your preferred version, anything like that.
So those are kind of the directions I would go there.
I would not blindly assume that just because it’s in structured data it will not be found.
Nor would I blindly assume that just because it’s in structured data it will be found.
It might be found.
It might not be found.
I would instead focus on what you want to have happen there.
If you want to have it seen as a link, then make it a link.
If you don’t want to have it crawled or indexed, then block crawling or indexing.
That’s all totally up to you.”
Additional Links
Many alternative forms of links have been developed by SEOs, some of which (like “link mentions”) are purely hypothetical and opinion.
Long ago, in the hope of improving rankings, SEOs started using a technique known as “Google Stacking,” which involved adding links to Google Sheets and then pointing links to those Google Sheets.
The concept was similar to Web 2.0 link building, where some SEOs believed falsely that links on Google Sheets and Google Sites would allow so-called “authority” from a Google-affiliated site to trickle over.
Mueller added this to his response regarding links in structured data, reaffirming that Google may crawl text files, JavaScript, and links in structured data. He added, however, that Google might not crawl those links in relation to structured data.
According to Mueller, if you want the power of links, it’s best to use actual links.
Citation
Watch John Mueller answered the question at the 23:20 minute mark.
Learn more from SEO and read What Structured Data Should You Use And Where Should You Use It?
