Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that Google will see links on a page that are not hyperlinks, they will consider them links, but will not pass any PageRank or link signals to the link.
John wrote "we can pick up links from text too, but they don't pass PR, so no disavow necessary."
This is in response to someone asking why Google shows links in the Google Search Console when that link isn't hyperlinked in the source code.
Here is that set of tweets:
@AGr4ves @methode We can pick up links from text too, but they don't pass PR, so no disavow necessary.
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) October 26, 2015We asked this question back in 2013 and back then, many people felt unlinked citations do help with rankings, some of the time.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
