Should you be using a Link element instead of a workflow action to navigate your users around your app? Well, if you are wanting your app to be SEO optimised then yes, definitely you need to be using Link element elements.

Demo Using Workflows

I have a simple contact database here and if a user clicks on the name of a contact they go through to a profile page which I'm building up to display that contact information. If I go back and then show you the workflow, if you click on the name then there is a workflow action to 'Go to page' with the current sales contact.

Now the disadvantage of that is that is all done sort of behind the scenes in Bubble. It's not something that is rendered in HTML when the page loads. It doesn't give Google the clues it needs in order to index your app.

Link Elements & HTML

So a better approach is instead to use the Link element and I won't worry too much about styling. So I just want this to be a quick demo and then link to internal page profile and then date the send current sales contact. Yeah, I'll leave the rest of the same so that's it preview. So I can display in terms of text exactly the same information as I can style it in a very similar way that I could before.

But if I right click on here and go Inspect you can see that there is actually an HTML hyperlink element in here. This is really important because when Google crawls your pages in your app it will look for real links between your pages such as this and then it will follow that link and it will index the content at the end if that's indeed what you desire.

Now the issue is that the way I had it set up previously using a workflow action is there was not this link, this 'a' element at all in the content. So if you need it to be SEO optimised then use the link.

Drawbacks of using the Link Element

Now there are some drawbacks of links and things that you can't do. For example, you couldn't link the whole of, if we have a look in the elements tree, here's my row let's say I wanted, if a user clicks on any part of the row they go through to the profile page and so normally you would say select everything and then put it into a group and then you can do a workflow action on the group navigate to page profile. So that way if a user is going to click here it takes them through to the profile.

Perhaps this is a good illustration of an appropriate compromise because I have now got this set up for the user that anywhere they click it takes them through to the relevant profile. But by including a Link elementin just one instance in my repeating group, I still have got that all important HTML content visible.

Wrap-up

So I hope that goes some way to illustrate why it's important to use Link element. When I started that Bubble, I certainly thought, what's the point of the Link element when I found that I was linking from every page using an element action.

But it is important and it can really help with your SEO.