Does google give any weight to screen tip contents?

[cmendla]

I have a situation where the owner wants to keep the home page lean and clean. We have a list of simple text links such as "widets for mondays" "widgets for tuesdays" "Widgets for march etc"..

(the site is an oscommerce site but the home page is html)

I would like to put a screen tip on the hyperlinks saying something like "we have widgets for mondays from major manufactures including: larry, moe and curley."

Two questions..

1. Does google give any weight to the content in the screen tips.

2. How safe is it to use the screen tips. I can imagine that a lot of spam can go into these. If we keep it honest will google look askance at it?

The ability to use the screen tips would help both from a design and a user perspective.

thanks

cg

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I think you probably mean the title attribute. This is valid HTML, which assists with accessibility so use it where appropriate. I would doubt that is carries much weight in Google but it certainly does no harm.

[cmendla]

BeeDeeDubbleU

Thanks, It is the title attribute I was thinking of.

I'll check the site in a week or so and see if any of the search engines are using it in their indexing..

thanks

cg

[pageoneresults]

I'll check the site in a week or so and see if any of the search engines are using it in their indexing.

I think you'll find that there isn't any weight given to title attributes. But, its always nice to have an up to date confirmation on this. ;)

As mentioned, it is an accessibility feature.

Note: If you find yourself using the title attribute frequently on links, I might suggest looking at your anchor text (the link text) and possibly rewording it. I find that many misuse the title attribute. The goal is to make your anchor text clear enough to describe the destination without having to use the title attribute.

I know, in some instances this is difficult to do and that's when using the title attribute comes into play. ;)