Are text links indexed by Google?

Question

We know that text links do not pass PageRank or signals, but say a page A contains a text link (not wrapped inside <a> </a>) to a page B and there is no other link on the net to page B and it does not appear in any sitemap.

Will Google index page B when it finds the text link on page A?

Answer 1

Google does index raw text links

Google and Bing will index a plain link as raw text just as it does with everything else. The page will however will need to be unique and offer something, otherwise Google may choose not to index everything on the page. It will however not pass juice as you would hope.

Google does use raw text links to discover new pages and new domains

Crawlers as long as I can remember have been using raw text links to discover new pages and domains, this is because sometimes sites use plain text to post content, newly registered domains will often be published in the thousands in raw text etc. John Mueller confirmed this a few years back:

SOURCE

We use those kinds of links to try to discover new content. So for instance if we see that someone has been writing about a new domain name and we can recognize that as a domain name in the text even without a normal HTML link there, then that is something where we will try to pick that domain name up, try to crawl it and index it and see if that is something worth including in our search results.

Sometimes it happens that we pick up a whole URL like that. Sometimes someone will try to shorter a URL with just a ‘…’ in between and we try to crawl that URL so we get it wrong. But our goal here isn’t necessarily to pass any pagerank, which we don’t do with those kinds of links. But rather discover new URLs that we haven’t seen before. And if we see someone write about a URL that we haven’t seen before we will pick that up and try to index that for search.

Standard link types:

• <a href="http://www.example.com">http://www.example.com</a> -
  • Adds to domain authority and passes juice
• <a href="http://www.example.com">www.example.com</a>
  • Adds to domain authority and passes juice
• <a href="http://www.example.com">Keyword</a>
  • Adds to domain authority, passes juice and some weight on keywords
• <a href="http://www.example.com"><img src="http://www.example.com/eg.jpg"></a>
  • Adds to domain authority, passes juice and weight on alt if present
• <p>www.example.com</p>
  • May pass some citation value
• <img src="http://www.example.com/eg.jpg" alt="example">
  • May add to domain authority and link diversity

Standard types with nofollow:

• <a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com</a>
  • Adds to link diversity
• <a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">www.example.com</a>
  • Adds to link diversity
• <a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">Keyword</a>
  • Adds to link diversity

All links are subject to Google and Bings algorithms meaning that not all links are equal.