‘Links are not crawlable’ – Lighthouse Report Failure
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Hi,
I have been using your plugin along with a few others for about 2 years now, and overall I am very happy with your products.
Today however, I noticed some erroneous coding in your ‘WPC Variations Radio Buttons for WooCommerce’ plugin. You can recreate the issue by using any lighthouse based tester online (such as Google PageSpeed Insights or web.dev) and checking any page that uses the aforementioned plugin.
The issue is that is triggers the ‘Links are not crawlable’ failure. The following are some examples I got using the URL provided (privately):
Choose an option <a class="dd-selected dd-option-without-desc"> Choose an option <a class="dd-option dd-option-selected dd-option-without-desc spai-bg-prepared"> Kuretake ZIG Posterman Wet-Wipe PMA-770 Liquid Chalk Pen with 15mm Tip – Whi… <a class="dd-option"> Kuretake ZIG Posterman Wet-Wipe PMA-770 Liquid Chalk Pen with 15mm Tip – Bla… <a class="dd-option"> Kuretake ZIG Posterman Wet-Wipe PMA-770 Liquid Chalk Pen with 15mm Tip – Blu… <a class="dd-option"> Kuretake ZIG Posterman Wet-Wipe PMA-770 Liquid Chalk Pen with 15mm Tip – Bro… <a class="dd-option"> Kuretake ZIG Posterman Wet-Wipe PMA-770 Liquid Chalk Pen with 15mm Tip – Gre… <a class="dd-option"> Kuretake ZIG Posterman Wet-Wipe PMA-770 Liquid Chalk Pen with 15mm Tip – Ora… <a class="dd-option"> Kuretake ZIG Posterman Wet-Wipe PMA-770 Liquid Chalk Pen with 15mm Tip – Red… <a class="dd-option"> Kuretake ZIG Posterman Wet-Wipe PMA-770 Liquid Chalk Pen with 15mm Tip – Yel… <a class="dd-option">As you can see, all of these are written incorrectly as they do not define where they are pointing. If anything, as these simply hold classes, I don’t understand why you have even put them in as anchors, where as you should perhaps have used ‘div’ or even ‘span’ (possibly outdated now…) instead? The official explanation as to why this counts as a fail through lighthouse is:
‘Search engines may use
hrefattributes on links to crawl websites. Ensure that thehrefattribute of anchor elements links to an appropriate destination, so more pages of the site can be discovered.’Could someone please look into this as a matter of urgency, as this is currently causing everyone that uses your plugin to use negative SEO practises, which Google is potentially penalising people for, of which I expect most of your customers don’t even realise. For me personally, I am losing approximately 10/11 out of the 100 points on the SEO score metric due to this error in your code on every single page on my website that utilises your plugin.
That’s a lot of negative SEO from something that should be very easy for you guys to fix!
I look forward to hearing back from you very soon!
Kindest regards,
Sam
The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]
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I’m disappointed I haven’t yet received a reply to my main thread, but I appear to have found a fix – I just wanted you to confirm this will allow for everything to work correctly, or whether this change will break the code? I am testing it now and it all appears to be working, and there are no longer errors being picked up when running the page on Lighthouse.
I changed the file:
wpc-variations-radio-buttons/assets/libs/ddslick/jquery.ddslick.min.js
I changed the 2 instances of
<a class=to<div class=I then changed the closing tags for both, from
</a>to</div>.I eagerly await your earliest response!
Hi @wpclever,
You are wrong.
Literally all you need to do is go to web.dev/measure/ and run the URL you just posted (https://demo.wpclever.net/woovr/product/hoodie-ddslick/), through it. You can clearly see the error being picked up under the SEO section.
Google and all other major search engines use the elements analysed within Lighthouse as part of their ranking algorithms.
It is therefore a certainty that they will be registering my aforementioned error within your plugin code.
Whilst I can see that within the source code it does not use hyperlinks without proper definition, your plugin does still present an SEO error when run through a lighthouse speed test, so somewhere along the way, something is not written correctly – That something is exactly the 2 pieces of code I posted above as part of my imposed fix.
When I implemented the fix on your plugin within my own website, I re-ran the lighthouse speed test straight afterwards and there were no errors showing. From my testing, there are no additional errors caused within your plugin when making the fix I posted above.
So based on all of this, I have to ask: Why are you so adamantly refusing to implement a fix to errors within your plugin code? I implore you to reconsider your response and test my fix on your own demo site so you can see for yourself exactly what I have fixed for you.
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