Forum Moderators: not2easy
I came to this technique through experimentation, and it seems quite a natural thing to do to those "guinea-pig" testers I asked to try it out - most all liked the idea and a few wondered why more sites don't do it.
But now, in thinking of Google and SE spiders, I'm having second thoughts. Would "href-activating" blocks of texts be bad for my site and my rankings?
When you say 'the visitor is taken to' - do you mean any time my mouse wonders over the text I'm navigated to a new page?
Or is the text actually contained within the same page - but in a hidden DIV or similar?
What's the actual method of 'activation' used - this will determine what happens with spiders. If possible - post a generic code snippet.
It's very simple actually - I just threw an "a {text-decoration:none;} and a:hover {colour:#colour}" into my CSS ... any titles or links I would add an underline or use some other graphic means to show that they were linkable. Anyhow, for the text body, as almost all my text is pulled from external sheets or databases (using .php) all I'd do in the layout is put an empty span with an empty "a href" tag within - and between all that the php code that would call the text.
Or in other words:
<span class="nice class"><a href="<?php $link_here;?>"><?php $text_body_here;?></a></span>
...really really simple, non?
[oops forgot] What I meant by "the visitor is taken to" is that, if the user decides to click on the text (that would turn red) he would be taken to the page it describes. Example I have a snippet describing our nice boutique, and instead of a "click here" or underlined word in that text as a link, I "activated" (meaning put an "a href" tag around it) the whole phrase.
Perhaps I used words more complicated than needed to describe what I was doing. [/oops forgot]
Your linked-to pages will not benefit from clearly defined keywords, as with a more carefully selected anchor text. And you browsers may not realise that they can just click the text, unless you make it clear. Don't turn off the 'hand' icon and you might get away with it. Consider using :hover to put the underline back whilst the user is scrolling over it.
I had left a dangling <a href=" open, and closed it way down the page
with "www.mysite.net </a>. The whole block of text became a link!
I fixed that, fearing some kind of penalty for keyword stuffing. - Larry
Of course the "hand" cursor is still there, and the whole block of text lights up (in a discreet red but lights up all the same) to show that it is clickable... what's more, the normal "user" reaction is to move the mouse towards what interests him on the screen (and if he really is interested in finding out more he'll be looking for a link in the block of text that interests him anyways, so...
[added]The funniest of it all is that it w3 validates perfectly[/added]
