Title in href and engines

[cre8pc]

Wasn't sure where to post this question :)

Does anyone know the purpose and browser compatiblity of a title in a link? Is its function the same as an alt tag? If so, do algorithms recognize it as content?

e.g. - <a href="page.html" title="Access communities, in-depth content, and commerce" target="_top" class="nav"><b>
page.html</b></a>

Thanks!

Kim Krause

[eljefe3]

Kim,

As far as I know this is just an attempt at adding extra keywords which aren't picked up by the browsers, yet are probably spidered by the SE's. This appears to be another form of keyword spamming.

From we have gathered at the conference in Sweden, there are many tricks that currently don't qualify as spam in the SE algo's (even though it is an apparent spam of the engines).
From what I have read of your many quality posts, I would not recommend using this strategy for a long term solution.
Keep in mind however, that there are many HTML tricks which can get you a better ranking in some engines even though the HTML validators would be raising serious warning flags as to your code being incorrect.

[bigmac]

Kim:
We use these href title tags on our web site to aid in navigation. With IE 5.0, on mouseover, the title shows as a text display similar to what alt text tags do on an image. I don't think they help with se's, but they haven't hurt us any as far as I can tell.

[cre8pc]

Many thanks.

I'll keep my eye out for more info on this. Having a mouseover text is cool, but if it has any negative impact on indexing or rank, I wouldn't choose to use it.

I was asked this question and had no answer, so I appreciate the input from this board.

(Sorry about my URL in sig. Wasn't thinking...)

Kim

[Brett_Tabke]

I've been trying different things along these lines. Now that most of the meta tag and header tricks are gone, I've been trying some things with CSS too. I can't find anything that will work, or hurt you. It is almost as if the engines are collectively ignoring anything non-standard in the header.