Does a link in a <noscript> tag get crawled by Googlebot ?
TL;DR: Yes, it took ~24h for Googlebot to visit the URL found in the <a href… placed in a <noscript> tag. Below the “protocol”.
This is the purpose of this SEO test.
I’ve added a <noscript> tag in this page, and each time a bot crawls the links in the <noscript> tag, I’ll get an email.
A better version would be to also store in database the number of time it has been crawled, by which bots (using UserAgent + regex for instance). It might be easily implemented in WordPress as a plugin. But since I’m not very aware of how it works and because the result of this test is pretty important to take a decision, I’ll just keep my logic for tests as it is 🙂
This is how it looks in the source code; I’ve simply updated the content of the parameter “test” in the screenshot, to make sure that even if Googlebot uses OCR, it can’t discover the link

edit 08/12/2025: My bad, the HTML was between the <code> tag, so Googlebot couldn’t find it. I’ve added a new tag, so lets see if Googlebot visits it !
edit 09/12/2025: It works, but not exactly as expected. Googlebot came with the User Agent ‘GoogleOther’. This is not what is expected. I expected Googlebot Mobile (or Desktop). CrawlGenius (formerly Kelo.gs) also discovered the URL 😉


=> Lets see in few days if it comes back with another User Agent !
edit 10/09/2025: It works as expected. Googlebot came to visit the “honeypot” URL, and this time with the good Googlebot. It took it A bit more than 24 hours to visit the link. It’s seems a lot, especially because the link was on the homepage, so I’ll now put a link not hidden in <noscript> to check if it takes less time to Googlebot to crawl the link.


