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 (2)
Interesting findings! Makes sense that repeated links act like internal endorsements—something we don’t usually think about when focusing purely on accessibility. It’s a good reminder that SEO isn’t just about following guidelines word for word, but about balancing usability and search signals.
Insightful and well-written as always!