Is there any difference in a plain text link on a page, and a hyperlink SEO wise?

Question

So I am making an HTML sitemap for my users, mostly to see how it affects SEO, and to see if it would be beneficial visitor-wise.

Is there any difference between the two types of links, and how search engines see them?

Plain text:

http://www.facebook.com/page

Hyperlink:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/page">Facebook Page</a>

Are these links seen differently by search engines such as Google? Which one is better for this situation?

Answer 1

1. Raw Text: http://www.example.com
   • Treated as a mention and Google treats mentions as a very relatively weak SEO signal and passes no link juice.
2. Anchor Text Keyword: <a href="http://www.example.com">Mojo</a>
   • Counts as a mention, passes juice to the receiving site and helps keyword relevancy to a certain degree, too many of the same anchor links like these can actually work as a negative as Google or Bing may consider it unnatural links.
3. Anchor Text Mention: <a href="http://www.example.com">http://www.example.com</a>
   • Counts as a mention and passes juice to the receiving site.
4. Links with nofollow: <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">
   • No juice is passed. Typically in error, most webmasters will assume that links that have the rel attitude nofollow have no benefit to their site, this is simply not true. Nofollow links have many hidden powers and can can help Google or Bing establish how relevant your content is. These also help diversify your link profile which helps avoid Google Penguin.