The question mainly refers to titles on links pointing to internal pages on your own site? Such as an article titled "
Hot parts for 2013 Mustang" for a blog about
custom cart parts. What if you are referencing an old article in your current article, by stating something like:
Last year, I put out a list of the hottest Mustang parts for 2012 and got some great feedback ...
What if "put out a list" is linked to "/hot-mustang-parts-2012.html", an old article you did a year before. Do you need a link title for "put out a list" because the url does not relate directly to the page where it is going? In other words, "put out a list" has no relation to the page people are being sent to, other than it is a "list". Should there be a title like, "see a list of hot 2012 mustang parts here"?
In other words:
Last year, I <a title="see a list of hot 2012 mustang car parts here" href="/hot-mustang-parts-2012.html">put out a list</a> of the hottest Mustang parts for 2013 and got some great feedback ...
I ask because I been studying a lot of sites like CNN and realize that they never use title tags. For instance, they had an article about two state officials in deep water. So, the article has a link titled "traffic jams" pointing to a cnn political blog post. Yet, the actual source code of the original article does not have a title or alt in the url labeled as "traffic jam". I also noticed the same with Yahoo too.
It's my understanding that the real rule of thumb is not to have any keyword terms in the article pointing to other internal pages or external sites? In other words if the focus keyword of an article is "2013 Mustang Parts", you don't want the term in the article labeled "2013 Mustang Parts" pointing to another site because that makes for a backlink that helps the site your pointing to with that keyword but ultimately hurts your own site for that same keyword?
BUT if in the same article, you have:
Out of all the mustangs released by Ford in 2013, my favorite was the Boss 302... v8 muscle car of my dreams! ...
What if "boss 302" links to a post at "/mustang2012-boss.html"? Because "boss 302" does not relate to the focus keyword, there is zero harm there, right? If anything the internal link helps as long as the content on "/mustang2012-boss.html" relates by mustangs, etc?
