Martin McEvoy wrote:
> The crux of what I am trying to explain is that at the
moment empty
> anchor text links mean nothing as far as SEO is
concerned, bots will
> either ignore or simply erase them from there index.
>
> If we as a respected community say that empty anchor
text DO mean
> something, then bots and other applications that crawl
the web will have
> to take this into account in order to correctly
represent their indexes.
>
> Black Hat SEO's will undoubtedly exploit this to their
own means
> rel="nofollow" is a classic example of where
a microformat has been
> exploited by SEO's to do something its not meant for
and thus may be
> regarded as an Anti design pattern.
>
> I do not wish (although the intentions are good) to be
responsible for
> opening the floodgates on any such behavior, and as a
community we have
> a responsibility to steer well clear of hacks, and half
hearted
> solutions that may end up causing more damage than
good.
Let me go through Martin's argument, as I understand it, to
explain why
I don't find it persuasive. My comments are in parentheses.
1. Search engines currently "ignore" TITLE on
non-linking A. (Does
anyone has any clear evidence to confirm this? Does that
evidence hold
for all major engines, or only for Google? I can't find
anything solid.)
2. If microformats made use of TITLE on non-linking A for
machine-readable data, search engines would want to use it.
(This seems
plausible.)
3. Black hat SEOs would then keyword-stuff TITLE on
non-linking A.
(Given the above premises, this seems plausible).
4. Search engines would not be able to distinguish
keyword-stuffed TITLE
attributes on non-linking A from microformat data.
(rel="nofollow" is a
standalone pattern and it would be difficult to tell correct
from
incorrect use without human inspection. But these
data-hiding patterns
are intended for use within super-patterns like hAudio that
tell parsers
what to expect. Distinguishing data-hiding patterns of this
sort from
keyword stuffing sounds like a trivial programming task, so
I think
search engines surely would be able to distinguish between
them.)
5. This problem only occurs with non-linking A. (But by its
very nature,
markup that hides content from most users, most of the time
— and that
includes /all/ patterns that hide data in TITLE attributes —
is
susceptible to keyword stuffing. Indeed, I would bet that
each and every
one of these patterns is already being abused by black-hat
SEOs,
effectually or not.)
NB: This email isn't intended as a general endorsement of
TITLE on
non-linking A. I'm deeply sceptical about misusing the TITLE
attribute
for human-unfriendly data, especially on anything other than
an empty
SPAN. I'm just saying I don't buy Martin's SEO-based
argument against
non-linking A in particular.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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