Does Google support Link Rel?

[ProfMoriarty]

Hello everybody,

I recently discovered the link tag for the head of a html page. And: I really like and want to use it now in all if my sites.

My question: Does the link tag (e.g. <link rel="up" href="widgets-level2.html" title="Everything about widgets"> effect google spidering? Or does the googlebot simply ignore it?

ProfMoriarty

[lazerzubb]

I'm not sure i haven't tested it myself, and i haven't seen the tag you are talking about, but i wouldn't belive the used it for ranking, especially not since it's not a common tag, i woulnd't advice using the title="keyword" tag to much too, use if only if you think it's necesarry, and remember to keep it descriptive.

Edit: spelling.

[edited by: lazerzubb at 12:31 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2002]

[Iguana]

I can remember discussions on link rel about 10 months ago. They are apparently used on some text only browsers to provide navigation (hence the toc, index, help, up values). Whether they are actually used by Google was never answered - but they are unlikely to do you any harm.

[ruserious]

I noticed that with completely new pages I set up. After calling up the index-page the rel links are the first ones it follows.

[ProfMoriarty]

@Iguana
Well, they were introduced already in HTML 2.0 and used in browsers like lynx. There youīre right. But Mozilla > 1.1 supports them, too! And Mac users, who browse with iCab donīt want to miss this alternative navigation. I tried it bymyself with Mozilla 1.1 and I really like this kind of "extra-navigation"

@ruserious
Thatīs an interesting fact, ruserious! I started this thread because Iīm sure Google supports all kind of html stuff which makes site browsing less browser independent. And the link-tag belongs definitely to these html-tags. I will support the link-tag now in all of my sites having alternative browsers in mind (pda, mobile, whatever) - and hopefully google likes my sites even more ;-)

[Iguana]

It would be easy to do a test. Create a page that has only 1 link to it - from a <LINK rel link on an existing and see what happens in the update after the next crawl

[Brett_Tabke]

Tested it earlier this year. No effect, but the urls do seem to get indexed as a normal link. (but! I used full urls and not relative urls). Like many others feel, I think there is a "flag" in the indexer that looks for anything starting with http:// and trys to extract something valid after it.

[ProfMoriarty]

just a quick note: Opera 7 also makes use of the link-tag to offer an alternative navigation. Take a look!