Hi, we are adding button in the top of page bar which are links to the other pages, how can we make these links visible to the search engines? As we cannot introduce anchor text there

[EmlSearch]

This post is deleted!

[MattAntonino]

Just make sure you submit a full sitemap and Google should pick up your internal pages. It's not the best way to design but it should work.

I don't think Tooltip text is the same as anchor text although I have to admit not testing this one.

Canonicals for dynamic URLs should all point back to the one absolute that you want Google to pick up:

• http://www.example.com/page
• http://www.example.com/page?color=green
• http://www.example.com/page?size=red

Should all have the same canonical (to http://www.example.com/page).

[ThompsonPaul]

There's nothing about anchor text that makes a link visible to search engines, Eml. Search crawlers discover links by finding the <a href="">tags in the source code of the page and following them. They'll do this regardless of whether there is anchor text associated with the link.

Crawlers are just as capable of following links if they're associated with images. As far as tooltip text - depends what you actually mean. The Title attribute (which is technically what displays tooltips) will be ignored. However, since the buttons you are talking about are actually images, you can add ALT text attributes to the images and that will be used by the crawlers essentially the same was as anchor text would be.

By far the better solution here though would be to use CSS styling to create the white boxes around actual text links, instead of using images.

As far as your canonical tag question - I think you may be confusing Canonical with no-follow? Canonical has nothing to do with links. It is a meta-data tag applied to the headers of pages as Matt describes.

I think what you're actually asking about is no-follow attributes for the links. In this case, there is no purpose to adding no-follow. The crawlers will discover the first link and essentially ignore the following links, recognising them as duplicates.</a>

<a href="">Hope that helps?

Paul</a>

[ThompsonPaul]

Matt - certainly agree having the pages in the sitemap (I'm assuming you mean XML sitemap) is critical, but the sitemap does next to nothing to provide flow of page authority to the most important pages - the internal linking structure accomplishes most of that. So I feel it's even more critical to ensure on-page links can be correctly spidered/followed as well.

P.

[MattAntonino]

Agreed, Paul.  I only gave my answer based directly on the question as I try not to assume I know what they want to do. I wouldn't build ANY part of my own site to look like the above domain.  Given that, OP asked if it would "make these links visible to Search Engines."  Sitemap does that, and as I originally posted "it's not the best way"

Also, if you basically ONLY have a sitemap and most of the authority flows to there, then it can only go to the pages on the sitemap - well, it'll work to an extent but it's not perfect.