Quotations and the Cite Attribute

Does Google index Cite?

[Martin Dunst]

hello,

authors can quote from other documents using the html elements "q" and "blockquote".
both elements have the cite attribute [w3.org], which contains the source document's uri.

imho, whenever authors use the cite attribute, they make a clear positive statement for the source document - or at least for parts of it.

do the values of cite-attributes play any role in google's pagerank computations or are they just ignored?

regards
Martin

[heini]

Martin, I would say search engines do not count the source given in the phrase elements as cite as a link.

Example: <BLOCKQUOTE cite="http://www.example.com/example.html">Example</BLOCKQUOTE>

I'm not entirely sure though, perhaps somebody can verify this?

[BigDave]

Unfortunately CITE is rarely used legitimately, but if it were to pass PR it would become one of the spammers favorite weapons since it would count as a link, without showing up on the page.

The only way that I can think of to make sure that it is used correctly is to check to see if the cited material is actually on the referenced page. That would be a major pain in the butt for little gain.

I agree that in the ideal world it would be a great way to give credit to authoritative sites that you are quoting. I just don't see it happening.

What you could do is to make your citation a visible link at the bottom of the blockquote. We know that google follows those, and the users can too.

[heini]

Well running that through the simspider it doesn't show as a link.

What I would like to know however is the purpose of the url in those phrase elments. Is there any browser or web application making use of it?

[BigDave]

The only thing that I could find was using JS or CSS to display the citation URI. That along with a bunch of complaints avout CITE not being very useful for offline sources or online sources where you might want to be able to have some text with the URI.

I tried it in Moz, IE, Opera and Konq, and none of them did anything with the cite.