All hyperlinks are black in non-JS version served to Googlebot

AI-generated summary

A bug has been reported where hyperlinks appear as black text in the non-JS version of the site served to Googlebot, making them indistinguishable from regular text. This issue affects how Google perceives and ranks the site. stance455 notes that pages in the Google cache updated before March 24 show blue hyperlinks, suggesting the issue is recent. sam mentions that the designers are working on cleaning up the crawler stylesheet, and refers to a related discussion on legacy browser support.

Initially, I thought this was intentional but now it seems its a somewhat recent bug

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BQivkuDuVHgJ:https://meta.discourse.org/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=il

All hyperlinks, menus, and links in the body of posts are the same color as the text. Making them indistinguishable from regular text. You might say… “who cares? This is not what users see”

Well, its what google sees and they are ranking us based on what they perceive the user is seeing

Discussion on giving Googlebot the JS version ( to at least try )

Pages in the google cache that haven’t been updated as of at least March 24 are showing blue hyperlinks for me ( if that helps )

Our @Designers are cleaning up the crawler stylesheet at the moment, see:

Let’s keep the discussion on that topic for now.

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