Does Google index HTML title attributes that are shown as tooltips on mouseover?

Question

I have a choice of representing list of links on the site page: I can show them as a two column table (the first column for the link itself and the second for the referenced site description) or create the list without any description. The description will appear by hovering by mouse over the certain link. Which choice is better from SEO point of view?

The text on the page will be indexed by the bots, but what about the title attribute which is responsible for the link description appearing while hovering it? Will it be indexed by the bots as well? Which choice is better?

Answer 1

The most SEO-secure method is the Case 1: your link title (or description) equals to your link anchor. In this case Google will index it to 99,9999%.

Case 1

<a href="http://www.example.com">YOUR LINK'S TITLE/DESCRIPTION</a>

If you make it like:

Case 2

<table> <tr> <td><a href="http://www.example.com">Link Anchor</a></td> <td>YOUR LINK'S TITLE/DESCRIPTION</td> </tr> </table>

or like

Case 3

<a href="http://www.example.com" title="YOUR LINK'S TITLE/DESCRIPTION">Link Anchor</a>

there is no warranty about correct indexing and relation of the link and its description. Some tests hovewer talk about indexed title attributes, but test results are not proven, and the indexing is not assured.

Hovewer, you can improve the Case 2 with structured data, like:

Case 2.1

<table itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Thing"> <tr> <td itemprop="name">Name</td> <td><a itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com">Link Anchor</a></td> <td itemprop="description">YOUR LINK'S TITLE/DESCRIPTION</td> </tr> </table>

which will grow the chance of the link description to be indexed AND correctly related to the link itself.