: Does Google count a text only link as a backlink? I would like to know if anyone knows whether a text only mention in a post i.e. www.example.com (NOT placed in <a> tag) counts as a

@Cugini213

If I understood your question correctly, this may answer it. if you just mention a single name without a hyperlink it won't pass any link juice as you need a hyperlink, but if you use a name as anchor text where there is a hyperlink underneath it will pass link juice.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Megan663

Googlebot uses text links for link discovery. I've seen tests that show that Googlebot will crawl URLs that it could have only found through text mentions.

Google patent filings indicate that they use brand mentions to determine brand authority. That is text mentions of a brand name or of a domain name name are tallied to determine how highly regarded a website brand is.

I have not seen evidence that traditional link juice (PageRank) is passed when a URL is displayed as plain text. I would expect that it is not. Plain text URLs are easy to spam. There is no possibility with them to use the nofollow attribute to show that the mention was user created and not to be trusted.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Sarah324

No, it is not count as backlinks because there is no <a> tag. Reputation pass only when there is <a> tag.

The link you mention from WF is talking about this <a href="https://example.com"></a> Notice? There is no any anchor text. But there is <a> tag, so reputation will pass to destination link. So anchor link and anchor text are different thing, and you misunderstood that.

Too much backlinks with naked anchor text, consider as blackhat technique and you might be get penalize.

Vote Up Vote Down