Hot answers tagged

19 votes
Accepted

What is the difference between noopener and noreferrer?

rel="noopener" is used so that when a new window is created upon clicking a link, malicious javascript code running in the new window will not access your previous window via the window.opener ...
Prinny's user avatar
  • 1,368
13 votes

How I can ensure that a link sent via email is opened only via user clicks from a mail client and not by bots?

In short: you can't. Answer depends on the definition of "bots", but if a bot can crawl the e-mail, the bot can hit the link. A bot doesn't necessarily respect robots.txt, or mentioned html ...
cusco's user avatar
  • 131
11 votes

Should I put rel="nofollow" on author link?

The seo experts told us to put rel="nofollow" to all external links. Trying to massage PR (for want of a better term) in this way sounds like a very outdated concept to me. Is e-Commerce any ...
MrWhite's user avatar
  • 42.6k
10 votes

Is link building a white hat SEO activity?

To Begin I must apologize to those who are in favor of TL;DRs. I have included a list of links Google does not like at the top just for you! This is one of my famous long answers. But it is ...
closetnoc's user avatar
  • 32.8k
10 votes
Accepted

How I can ensure that a link sent via email is opened only via user clicks from a mail client and not by bots?

Incorrectly used meta tags Instead of using two meta tags, you should put both values into a single tag. With two tags, some search engines may choose to obey only one of the two. <meta name="...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
9 votes

What is a toxic link?

Okay. To begin. The term toxic link is not used by Google. It is fully an SEO chatter class invention and some are using this term to either gain users to their site and scare the bejeebers out of ...
closetnoc's user avatar
  • 32.8k
9 votes
Accepted

Are spaces in "href" valid?

In (X)HTML5, the a element’s href attribute […] must have a value that is a valid URL potentially surrounded by spaces. As the anchor suggests, it may contain leading and trailing spaces. The ...
unor's user avatar
  • 21.7k
9 votes
Accepted

Speed comparison - absolute vs relative path links

Effect for browser: Though this looks like a bit of work for web browser, but technically it does not make much of a difference. The browsers are too fast to handle these relative url structure and ...
abhinsit's user avatar
  • 1,714
8 votes
Accepted

SEO impact of using non-Latin characters in URL

Some SEOs are wary of using these non-Latin characters in URLs because of the way it might display in certain browsers, or in certain text cases when the link is copied and pasted somewhere online....
Josip Ivic's user avatar
  • 3,888
8 votes

Is it a good SEO practice to send external links through an uncrawlable redirect script?

What you propose could be argued as blackhat SEO which can find your ranking negatively affected. At no times should pages or links be cloaked in any way. If you are wanting to prevent ranking passing ...
Chris Rutherfurd's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Should query string parameter values in a URI have single quotes around them?

<a href="link.php?a=first&b=second">Click here!</a> The only thing that might get flagged in that anchor is the unencoded &. The & should be HTML encoded. ie. &...
MrWhite's user avatar
  • 42.6k
7 votes
Accepted

Does Google punish pyramid linking and does reverse negative SEO exist?

What is Fair? To begin with, Google can certainly penalize any sites performance within it's own search engine for what it feels is unacceptable behavior in particular with respect to their ability ...
closetnoc's user avatar
  • 32.8k
7 votes

How I can ensure that a link sent via email is opened only via user clicks from a mail client and not by bots?

Not only can you not ensure it, it's highly likely that the link will be retrieved by programs not under the user's control. Many spam and phishing filters will pre-fetch any web pages linked to in ...
Mark's user avatar
  • 236
6 votes

Should I use anchor tag with next/link in Next.js for SEO?

It all depends on what MyButton component actually renders. The second case is always correct, since it renders regular a tag (a href="https://www.google.com">Go somewhere</a>), and ...
Ivan V.'s user avatar
  • 161
6 votes
Accepted

Using URLs as anchor texts

Some reasons I might not do so: The URL is probably uninteresting to most users. Often a link is integrated into a sentence and a URL doesn't integrate well.1 These days, with fancy search bars and ...
Luke Sawczak's user avatar
5 votes

What do the different parameters in an Amazon Associates (affiliates) URL do? (Why use the Associates interface?)

They look to me like they are marketing tags which capture a bunch of things about presentation of the product, e.g. Which version of the web page they showed you that 'inspired' you to link the ...
Harper - Reinstate Monica's user avatar
5 votes

Should URLs with UTF8 characters be encoded in HTML?

Do browsers handle these the same? Yes, all (modern) browsers handle these the same. In that all (modern) browsers implicitly URL encode (ie. percent-encode) the URL if you don't explicitly encode ...
MrWhite's user avatar
  • 42.6k
5 votes

rel="nofollow" On Quality User Supplied Links

if the linked to page is context appropriate and of a high value wouldn't it be better to allow the passing of pagerank? Quite probably yes. But unfortunately, in the real world, for arbitrary user ...
MrWhite's user avatar
  • 42.6k
5 votes
Accepted

Is there any difference in a plain text link on a page, and a hyperlink SEO wise?

Raw Text: http://www.example.com Treated as a mention and Google treats mentions as a very relatively weak SEO signal and passes no link juice. Anchor Text Keyword: <a href="http://www.example....
Simon Hayter's user avatar
  • 32.9k
5 votes
Accepted

Is it okay for SEO to wrap block elements in a link?

Yes, it is fine and even advisable to put block elements inside an a element where appropriate, as long as the browser supports HTML5 (all modern browsers do): The a element may be wrapped around ...
Maximillian Laumeister's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

Why don't SEO tools such as Screaming frog crawl some of my links?

The links under "Destinations you might like" appear to be all generated by JavaScript - they don't actually appear in the initial HTML source of the page. This will prevent most "SEO ...
MrWhite's user avatar
  • 42.6k
5 votes

Personal blog vs Medium

The Correct Answer is...Both? Everything should start on your website. So you should definitely create that. The advantage here is that you're creating your own place with a domain that is associated ...
Mike Ciffone's user avatar
  • 5,931
4 votes

Is link building a white hat SEO activity?

The "process of manually building links in any way possible" would not classify as White Hat SEO. But linkbuilding does not mean "in any way possible". White Hat Link Building: The Zen Masters' ...
the's user avatar
  • 1,570
4 votes
Accepted

When there are two links to home page (logo and navigation) how should it be optimized for search engines?

Don't worry about small things like this. It's perfectly fine to have both links. Don't nofollow either of the links. With regard to the home page links… Having the logo linked to the homepage ...
grg's user avatar
  • 3,207
4 votes
Accepted

Are text links indexed by Google?

Google does index raw text links Google and Bing will index a plain link as raw text just as it does with everything else. The page will however will need to be unique and offer something, otherwise ...
Simon Hayter's user avatar
  • 32.9k
4 votes
Accepted

Website being bombarded by non-existent URLs

I noticed a newly registered domain is being hit by non-existent URLs... It's being hit for thousands per day which is causing high server load. There are ways to mitigate the load from all sources (...
Mike -- No longer here's user avatar
4 votes

What is _ga in url path?

This is needed for cross-domain-tracking, and yes, it stands for google analytics. You can't stop Google from adding the tag, but you can tell Analytics to ignore it in your reports.
Josip Ivic's user avatar
  • 3,888
4 votes
Accepted

How can I internally link to pages while keeping minimalist aesthetics?

I do have an idea that may very well satisfy the people you work for, but I still recommend your idea of having navigation stand out, but since your bosses come with not-so-wonderful requests, I'll ...
Mike -- No longer here's user avatar
4 votes

Will unlinked pages on a WordPress site get indexed by Google?

Google and Bing bots are not mind readers If you have a link on your site, another site, or within a sitemap, then only then will it become indexable. It can't index something it can't find. If you ...
Simon Hayter's user avatar
  • 32.9k
4 votes

Generating backlinks through a javascript video widget without getting manual action penalties?

Google no longer views widgets as harmless. They have been used too many times to manipulate search results. Your plan to use widgets to build backlinks is a risky plan today. Google's official ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar

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