Hot answers tagged links
28
There's no circularity implied by having <link rel='canonical' href='http://www.example.com/product/foo' /> appear as http://www.example.com/product/foo.
That's the intent. You're saying "the best URL" for this page is http://www.example.com/product/foo, so when the search engines hit http://www.example.com/product/foo?id=1, or ...
20
According to SEOmoz's article Link Title Attribute and its SEO Benefit:
The title attribute can be used to describe almost any HTML element. A beneficial way to use the title attribute for SEO purposes would be to use it in the link element to provide descriptive text within an anchor tag (which gives you more real estate for your targeted keyword phrases). ...
20
The problem about "click here" links is that they are not meaningful, as obviously a link is there to be clicked! You should try to link something that describes what you are linking.
For instance, instead of using:
There are several books about cooking:
link1
link2
link3
You could write
There are several books about cooking:
The art of cooking
500 ...
13
Linking out to relevant sites is never a bad thing and may possibly help your rankings (source).
The only time linking to another site may hurt you is when the site is considered by Google to be part of a bad neighborhood (sites that are created to crosslink themselves and boost their ranking or ranking of a main site). By linking to them you are ...
11
I would advise against doing it. Search engines get better and better at detecting such tricks. No matter what you do, some day search engines will notice it. It's not worth it and it's certainly not "white hat".
From http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 (emphasis mine):
Make pages primarily for users, not for search ...
11
On using Asterix in URLs
Using an Asterix in your URL is probably not such a great idea, largely because:
Neither UTF-8 or ASCII is currently able to denote an Asterix.
He would be little more than a smudge in a standard browser address bar.
I doubt he'd like it very much. And he has some quite large friends.
It's just weird.
On using Asterisks in URLs
...
10
Yes, because it's a reserved character.
Other reserved characters
The asterisk ("*", ASCII 2A hex) and exclamation mark ("!" , ASCII 21 hex) are reserved for use as having special significance within specific schemes.
From here: http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_URI_Recommentations.html
EDIT:
Section 2, on characters, has been rewritten to ...
10
Technically, "#" is a well-defined URL reference that points to the start of the current document, so it is not “broken” in formal sense. It can, however, be regarded as bad for accessibility, and it is also a common symptom of “fake” links, i.e. a elements that are supposed to link to something external but depend on JavaScript. (In the very old days, <a ...
9
Google does not just ignore links in sections that are display:none.
Consider DHTML multi-level drop down menus. In such a menu, you hover over the top level menu item and a list of links drops down. That is a case in which the links are in display:none initially, but user interaction with the page shows them. Using drop down menus like this is ...
8
One way links in context are most desirable. For instance if a sentence read:
Reading this programmer's take on the subject (where the italicized text is a link to your blog) is a lot better than a link in the sidebar. Sure, it may increase traffic .. but I don't think it will directly help your ranking. Remember that every new Wordpress blog, by default, ...
8
Yes, the ALTernate attribute acts as 'anchor text' for links that contain images.
A recent test found both Bing and Google indexed/ranked ALT attribute values: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4265397.htm
Also, you need to consider that Google operates functionally like the lowest common browsing denominator (like a Lynx browser, or as one SEO put it ...
7
As far as SEO benefits nothing stands out as being truly beneficial other then canonical. The only other SEO possible benefits I can see from using the <link> tag is when using start/next/previous to indicate pages related to the current one, like in a multi-page article, to help the search engines understand the relationship between those pages. ...
7
That theme is from some collection posted on a Blogspot site. Read this:
Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else
There's a pretty good chance nobody edited anything, and the link was there in the first place. If, for whatever reason, you're set on continuing to use that particular theme, the Authenticity Checker and ...
7
Backlinks still form the #1 contributing factor in getting a page to rank in Google.
Generally speaking:
High Quality back-links are better than high quantity back-links
Freely-given links are better than procured back-links (procure can mean artificially gained in any manner, not just bought)
Page Rank still matters in terms of the currency of ...
7
Looking at bots vs. browsers, they display every user agent that's ever visited their page. Some clever spammer realised that this would be a clever way to drive traffic to their sites, because webmasters/anyone looking at the site is probably going to wonder why there's a url in the user agent, think it's a new specification or something, and visit the url ...
6
Start by using Ontolo's free SERP dominator tool (free registration required) this will let you know which sites specifically are ranking across your top keywords (IE the most powerful) even if you think you know it's worth the 5 minutes it takes to run the report because you'll usually find a surprise or two.
then buy your comepetitor's backlink profiles ...
6
Linked text should tell a visitor what they will find on that page
W3C offers this advice about how to use link text in their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines:
Good link text should not be overly general; don't use "click here."
Not only is this phrase device-dependent (it implies a pointing
device) it says nothing about what is to be found if ...
6
People use all sorts of things for links. Use whatever makes sense for your actual design. The icon you're currently using is fairly common and well-known. For whatever it's worth, I don't think I've ever encountered that → character in this use. Asking if it's a replacement kind of assumes there's a standard in the first place; there isn't.
Such ...
6
Hi NotMuchOfAProgrammer,
It's not a real backlink since the Javascript is injecting the URL after the page has been loaded. If you disable javascript you will see:
<noscript>
<a href="http://ads.garden.org/www/delivery/ck.php?n=aa4a0d78&cb=INSERT_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE" target="_blank">
<img ...
5
To me your menu sounds unusable. I don't believe anyone would go through all the links without crying.
I really think the best thing to do in your case is to redo your navigation, or have an information architect look at your site.
In your case I would think less about Google and more about users. If you focus on making users happy Google will be too.
5
Your Sitemap file must be UTF-8 encoded (you can generally do this when you save the file). As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the characters.
This may help out, http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php
5
That is correct. It is the HTML entity for an ampersand (&) and is the proper character representation of it in a properly encoded URL. Ampersands (&) and well as < and > are special characters in XML and HTML and need to be displayed using their special character entities.
5
Outgoing links from Facebook, for example, to a website are caught by a redirect script ("Are you sure you want to leave Facebook?") - these links are definitely not counted toward the PageRank of the destination site.
Internal links within Facebook (i.e. links to the Facebook page within Facebook's indexes) will not have a nofollow or robots.txt ...
5
No, links inserted with Javascript will not be crawlable. You are better using a server-side solution to add links, i.e. output <a href="link">etc</a> direct in your HTML.
Having said that, search engines are always improving. Google recently announced major improvements to the crawling of Flash files, so it's not impossible that some Javascript ...
5
I read about link-wheels both the link you posted and this one that is more detailed: http://www.squidoo.com/LINK_WHEELS
1st of all I would say that link wheels are actually NOT real black hat SEO, they might be called gray hat, because Matt Cutt's himself suggests to spread over web 2.0 sites the existence of your main business/website by writing ...
5
You can't afford to do link exchanges and I can prove it. I explain in detail on my website, but simply put, when you factor in time for discovery, contact, failure, success, implementation, and maintenance, link exchanging is too expensive. It doesn't scale and it has low if any return on investment. What's worse, you can't measure the ROI either.
You're ...
5
Assuming your site has it's own unique domain name, you probably should check if this words are not on your site in user comments, a wiki forum or some sort of area where public can introduce/modify content. Maybe you are importing an RSS/feed or some sort of external content that may contain those words, including advertising programs or public ...
5
It's a good idea to wrap phone numbers in tel URIs because:
Mobile browsers often parse numbers incorrectly, especially with unusual formats. All they're doing is attempting to wrap phone numbers in anchor links and tel URIs; doing it for them reduces the chance of error.
It's a vendor-neutral, official proposed standard that desktop VOIP phone clients ...
5
Assuming those search results are available to be crawled by search engines as their support for form submissions is very limited at best, repeating that text isn't going to hurt your SEO efforts at all. Text repeated in that manner is perfectly normal and common. I wouldn't change how you are doing or or worry about this at all.
5
I just read an article about this on hubspot. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33589/40-Ways-to-Get-Banned-From-the-Top-5-Social-Networks.aspx
If I correctly understand what you're doing, the only problem I see is that it is not using a Facebook app for the contest.
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