The Case of the Missing Double Quotes

Google was blind to my single quote links

[pearl]

Has anyone else noticed this?

"<a href..." links that have single quotes instead of double quotes are NOT crawled by Google.

When run thru the HTML checker - it's OK and of course it works for visitors. However, the spider sim notices the problem. (If I looked closer I would have noticed some of my links were missing).

[mcavic]

Hmm. I see the Sim Spider doesn't like that. But Google just deepcrawled my whole site, despite the single quotes.

Does anyone else have evidence one way or the other?

[SEO practioner]

I was under the impressiona that a link always needed double quotes to be valid.

Since when is a link in a single quote operational?

[mcavic]

Hmm. In IE 5 and Mozilla 1.3, the single quote hrefs work fine. Fast has been crawling them for me too, and TurnItIn. Officially, though, I don't know.

[glatthor]

I use single quotes within <a href='$url'> on most of my pages and Google doesn't seem to have any problems with that. The outgoing links are found when I search for "link:$url".

[dmorison]

Hi,

Have a look at...

[w3.org...]

Basically says single or double quotation marks are fine.

[Dolemite]

No quotes at all seems to work fine, AFAICT.

Basically, if it works in browsers, its likely work for spiders. If you were google, would you want links to be this easy to hide?

[rogerd]

At Pubcon, the implication was that if Google saw text that looked like a URL, it would probably count it as a link. This seemed to be a gradual progression.

I suppose if Google keeps moving in that direction, it could result in a new kind of hidden link, e.g., a javascript link that doesn't actually work for humans.

[vincevincevince]

I have a site which uses only ' and that has never been crawled successfully :'(

I'm not sure if it is ' ' in links or two? arguments in the url which does it... guess?

[pageoneresults]

From the W3C...

3.2.2 Attributes [w3.org]

By default, SGML requires that all attribute values be delimited using either double quotation marks (ASCII decimal 34) or single quotation marks (ASCII decimal 39).

I've never used single quoted attributes except in the case of javascript. I've not seen much discussion on this either. I quote all attributes as this is required to pass validation.

In general, using double quotes is preferable, since for the human eye single quotes are sometimes difficult to distinguish from other characters like accents. Moreover, some browsers do not handle single quotes correctly.

In html 3.2, double quotes were mandatory. Single quotes were not valid. I believe single quotes are a part of the 4.0 standard. Most of what I've read recommends that you use single quotes only where applicable. Typically quoted objects within quotes.

<added>Sorry dmorison, I didn't see your reference to the W3C up above. ;)

[topr8]

we make extensive use of single quotes as we have many dynamically driven pages

where the links are written in the form ...

response.write("<a href='mylink.htm'>text</a>")

we've had no problem being spidered

[rharri]

I have a site with some Java. When we used <a href='<%=response.encodeURL("/widgets.jsp")%>:SSL'>Widget Record</a>
the pages appeared not to be indexed. Changing the single quotes to doubles appears to have solved that problem.

Bob