June 25, I presented a paper about Accessible Hyperlinks and Search Engines at SIU 2025. I'll share three strange but real things we learned.
This is Part 1: The tale of the lonely hyperlink.
So I asked the question:
"Does accessibility in internal links affect how subpages rank on Google or Bing?"
To answer this, I scraped and tagged thousands of internal links from shopping sites, avoided search-term bias by using the "site:" operator, and matched each link to its SERP position. Then I extracted 11 accessibility-related features.
One of them was called:
is_unique – Is this internal link unique within the site?
Now here’s the kicker:
WCAG 2.4.4 and accessibility guidelines recommend using unique, descriptive link text — vague or repetitive links like “click here” can confuse screen readers or keyboard users.
We expected uniqueness to help.
But when I trained classifiers to predict SERP presence...
Links that were repeated across the site — not unique — tended to perform better.
Yep. The “unique” ones ranked worse.
Wait, what?
“But Goker, how could repeated links help SEO?”
Here’s a hunch:
Search engines may treat repeated links as internal endorsements.
If your homepage, nav, and product pages all link to a subpage, that page looks important.
If only one lonely link leads there… the bot might think: "Meh. Not a big deal."
So ironically, being everywhere might help you get found.
Data Snapshot:
Feature: is_unique
Ranked (avg): 0.18
Not Ranked (avg): 0.75
That’s a pretty wild drop. Repetition seems to amplify presence.
Almost like link-echoing your way into relevance.
📂 Resources
- 📊 Dataset: goker.dev/datasets/hyperlinks
- 🧠 Code: goker.dev/codes/hyperlinks
TL;DR
Accessibility says: Use one clear link.
SEO says: Louder, everywhere, and often.
What should a dev do?
Maybe both.
Design for people. Then… amplify for bots.
Next up: Contrast Ratios and the Surprising Limit of Being “Too Accessible”
Stay tuned.
Top comments (1)
Insightful and well-written as always!