Does “click here” count against link text?
Introduction
I’ve never been a fan of the phrase “click here.” It always seemed a sign of amateur content writing, something I associated with bad color choices and people who can’t write. So I was biased. That doesn’t mean I’m right.
Is that phrase (and its relatives, “read more,” “download now” & “tap here”) detrimental? The W3C recommends against using “click here” in links. So do many SEO companies (Click here is evil, Don’t say “click here” on link text, 113 design guidelines for home page usability).
Still, I couldn’t find research to support the claim.
So I decided to find out.
The experiment
I created eight different keywords. Four of the keywords went into four separate files. The other four were used to link to those files. I uploaded all of the files to several different websites with varying amounts of traffic and hid the link keywords on their home pages.
To make sure the keywords were unique, I added the word fragment “thinkin” to the end of each keyword with no spaces. But even then Google surprised me.
The questions were: Which keywords would different search engines find? Would they prefer “click here” links, keyword links, or neither?
Left: Testing how “click here” links work. Will searching for keyword C reveal page Y? Will searching for “click here” show pages A & B?
The results
Found inside pages
| Engine | Site 1 | Site 2 | Site 3 | Site 4 | Total possible |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bing | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| 1 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | |
| Yahoo | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
Associated keyword link with inside content
| Engine | Site 1 | Site 2 | Site 3 | Site 4 | Total possible |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bing | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | |
| Yahoo | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
Associated “click here” with inside content
| Engine | Site 1 | Site 2 | Site 3 | Site 4 | Total possible |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bing | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Yahoo | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
After two weeks, I checked Google, Yahoo and Bing for my eight keywords, both per site web-wide.
All three search engines found every home page keyword on every site. Search engines weren’t having any trouble scanning the home pages, but results for the inside pages were mixed.
Bing did not find any of the inside pages. That is, when I searched for keywords W, X, Y and Z using the site: prefix, Bing reported no results on all sites.
Yahoo found two inside pages, each on different sites. To get there, it followed one keyword link and one “click here” link. But it did not associate the links with the pages.
Google’s results were more complicated.
Google found all inside pages on three sites and one inside page on the last site. Google associated the clickable words with the text they linked to on three of the four sites. That is, searching for keywords A & B found both the links that contained A & B as well as the pages they point to, even though those pages contained different keywords.
Searching for “click here” with Google found all four home pages, both inside pages on two sites, and one inside page on the other two sites.
Notes
You can use the “site:” prefix to search a particular website, rather than the entire web. For example, entering “site:benthinkin.co.nz keyword” will look for “keyword” within “benthinkin.co.nz.”
Google and Bing support the site: prefix. Yahoo doesn’t, but its advanced search allows you to enter a specific domain name.
All search engines used the pages’ titles as clickable links in their results.
Conclusion?
The experiment was limited, but shows a clear result: Google cares about the content that gets clicked. Bing and Yahoo, not so much. While using “click here” in a link doesn’t count against you, using keywords in links appears to help find content.