Google's cache (text version) does not show hyperlinks

Google's cache (text version) does not show hyperlinks - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about google-search, web-crawlers, google-index, google-cache to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Google's cache (text version) does not show hyperlinks.Problem :

I have list of product links on one of our website's page. For some reason when I view the google's cached version of this page, google strips out all the product links.
Links in the header and footer remains intact though.

Primary concern is that if links are being stripped out from cached version then google search can't see and thereby index them.

Here's the product markup we are using:

<div class="product">
    <a href="/product-url#color-name" data-lightbox><img class="img" src="https://some-product-image.jpg" />
    </a>
    <div class="content">
        <span class="line1">Product name</span> <span class="separator">|</span>
        <span class="price">Price</span>
        <br/>
        <div class="colors">
            <span class="color color-selected" style="background-color: #00008B" data-product-ImageLink="https://some-product-image.jpg" data-link="/product-url#color-name">&nbsp;</span>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

I can't figure out why the <a> links are being stripped out?

Solution :

The text only version of their cache is exactly that: no images and only text. The only thing that you have in that link is an image with no text. It is removed in the process of creating a text only view of the page for the Google cache. The full HTML version of the cache has working links.

I wouldn't expect this to have any effect on Google's ability to identify, follow, fetch, index, and rank the links to your product pages. However, it certainly makes the text only version of the cached page less than useful.

One easy workaround would be to add a link around the product name:

<span class="line1">Product name</span>

to

<span class="line1"><a href="/product-url#color-name">Product name</a></span>

That would make the product name clickable for users, which I think would be a good thing for usability. I would expect product names to be clickable in a listing of products. You could even use CSS to style it such than it doesn't look different than it does now.

If the issue about google-search, web-crawlers, google-index, google-cache is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.