Hidden Link

[unni]

Lynx viewer is showing alt="" as hidden link. In my homepage I was having a link like this

<a href="xyz.html" alt=""> Lynx viewer was showing this link under hidden links section.. After I put some text on alt tag it is ok now.

Just sharing my experience..

Will google also consider it as a hidden link?

[tedster]

I'm almost 100% sure the answer is no, that is standard practice. In fact. I'm surpised that Lynx saw that as a hidden link. I would expect that kind of result only in the case of a typo or coding error earlier on the page, something like a missing quote mark or angle bracket.

[koan]

Do not specify irrelevant alternate text when including images intended to format a page, for instance, alt="red ball" would be inappropriate for an image that adds a red ball for decorating a heading or paragraph. In such cases, the alternate text should be the empty string ("").

[w3.org...]

[MThiessen]

stupid qustion here, you do have a closing tag for that right?

[encyclo]

There is no

alt

attribute available on an

a

element. With invalid HTML like this, parsing problems or misinterpreted intentions are unsurprising.

I assume you wanted to use the

title

attribute, or the

alt

attribute on an

img

element?

Step one for bug-hunting: the HTML validator [validator.w3.org]. :)

[tedster]

You are so right, encyclo, thank you. I completely spaced out on the fact that this wasn't an img element!

[MThiessen]

LOL so did I! I thought something looked screwy with it...

[unni]

Oh... Sorry.. I also didnt notice that it was an anchor tag... Actually I was correcting technical problems for one of my client site.. 6 year old code with full of errors.... let me share some of their problems..(it is a site with 10,000+ articles)

index.asp problem

www/nonwww problem

duplicate content for articles pages... like
Article.asp/article.asp, catid/CatID,leafid/leafID,space=/space=xx etc like this 9 different types of words in article pages.. so if we take permutations Google would find 256 duplicate pages for each article page!

old two article urls were redirected to article.asp (art.asp & viewart.asp) with a 200 status code.. so SEs indexed all of them

duplicate for cat pages like Category.asp and category.asp

subcategory.asp and SubCategory.asp

Some pages indexed with ip.

totally 6 index pages were indexed
site.com/
site.com/index.asp
www.site.com
www.site.com/index.asp
1.2.3.4/
1.2.3.4/index.asp

No robots.txt so everything was indexed

No proper title/desc/kwd tags

links with and without trailing slash

Duplicate problem because of offset problem... xyz.asp and xyz.asp?page=0

Some sections were using previous/next format so SEs were not able to reach many pages.. for eg in a section with 99 pages using this format Google indexed only first, second and last pages..

Like this totally i found around 200+ problems and every day finding new ones... thats why now i am suspecious for everything :)

this site is with 1000 uniques per day.. How long SEs will take to correct these problems.. and how much uniques can i expect after that?