In the latest 09/24/2021 hangout, Google’s John Mueller explained that Google uses the title and anchor text of a link together.
One webmaster was performing a juggling act between his technical team and his accessibility team by using dynamic alternative text on a button.
To help solve his problem, John explained that Google uses the title and anchor text together.
He explained that if you have pieces of the information in the title that also cover the part that’s missing in the anchor text, Google will still crawl and index both and make its decisions based on that.
John also explained that Google doesn’t use cookies on the button, so Google would not be able to see what happens there dynamically.
This conversation occurs at approximately the 00:42 mark in the video.
John Mueller 09/24/2021 Hangout Transcript
Oh, cool. Thank you. Um, so kicking it off, we have a key button as part of our mobile site navigation. And we’re looking to change it from, you know, a static button, which always links to the same URL to dynamic based on some elements of the page the user is on in order to, you know, make our experiences more relevant, bring users closer to our key conversion pages. So I’ve proposed a change, which would update the button anchor text dynamically, but it really pissed off our designers by potentially increasing the button size to accommodate the new text. Then I proposed, you know, a change to the acceptance criteria, resizing the text based on the available button real estate, thereby pissing off my accessibility folks. So given all of that context, my question is, is the global title attribute an adequate replacement for anchor text? Or should we perhaps change the button to be a graphic and use, you know, dynamic alt text? What would your recommendation be here?
John 1:49
My, my understanding is we use the title plus the anchor text, essentially, together. So if you have things in the title that kind of cover the part that you’re missing in the anchor text, that should work out. I’m not 100% sure. But this is probably also something you could test with like a made-up word that you put as a title attribute and wait for a while for everything to get indexed and see how that gets picked up. But I’m pretty sure that we just combine those two together.
Webmaster 1 2:25
Okay cool that that really helps. Thank you for the context. Also, you know, how important from an SEO standpoint, would it be for the dynamic nature of the button to be based on the page content rather than like personalization through using cookies?
John 2:44
So we wouldn’t use cookies, so we wouldn’t see what would happen there. That’s kind of the one thing. So essentially, for Googlebot, it would look like it’s always based on a page content, because we like we wouldn’t be able to give you a cookie, so you wouldn’t be able to keep any personalization for that. We would essentially always see the same thing that a non-cookie user would see.
Webmaster 1 3:09
Okay, perfect. I just needed that for my technology folks. So thank you.
