URLs outside of an Anchor

[meaculpa]

This may be a silly question but do the spiders notice URLs that appear outside of an anchor tag and are just part of the HTML text on my pages? In other words, would they have any effect on the PR a page can donate, etc?

[BigDave]

Googlebot will notice and crawl anything that it recognizes as an URL, but that is not the same as passing PR. I did an experiment a little over a year ago and only anchors passed PR.

[meaculpa]

Googlebot will notice and crawl anything that it recognizes as an URL, but that is not the same as passing PR. I did an experiment a little over a year ago and only anchors passed PR.

Big Dave,

Thank you for the response. That's very interesting, and perhaps it wasn't such a silly question after all. Given what you said, are you aware of any downside whatsoever to non-anchored URLs? I.E., would you try to minimize them or are they essentially harmless?

[Adversity Sure Fire]

Yes, its very important info.

Thanks.

[Wizard]

I wonder if existence of many non-anchored URLs may improve crawling depth.