Martin McEvoy wrote:
The crux of what I am trying to explain is that at the moment empty
anchor text links mean nothing as far as SEO is concerned, bots will
either ignore or simply erase them from there index.
If we as a respected community say that empty anchor text DO mean
something, then bots and other applications that crawl the web will have
to take this into account in order to correctly represent their indexes.
Black Hat SEO's will undoubtedly exploit this to their own means
rel="nofollow" is a classic example of where a microformat has been
exploited by SEO's to do something its not meant for and thus may be
regarded as an Anti design pattern.
I do not wish (although the intentions are good) to be responsible for
opening the floodgates on any such behavior, and as a community we have
a responsibility to steer well clear of hacks, and half hearted
solutions that may end up causing more damage than good.
Let me go through Martin's argument, as I understand it, to explain why
I don't find it persuasive. My comments are in parentheses.
1. Search engines currently "ignore" TITLE on non-linking A. (Does
anyone has any clear evidence to confirm this? Does that evidence hold
for all major engines, or only for Google? I can't find anything solid.)
2. If microformats made use of TITLE on non-linking A for
machine-readable data, search engines would want to use it. (This seems
plausible.)
3. Black hat SEOs would then keyword-stuff TITLE on non-linking A.
(Given the above premises, this seems plausible).
4. Search engines would not be able to distinguish keyword-stuffed TITLE
attributes on non-linking A from microformat data. (rel="nofollow" is a
standalone pattern and it would be difficult to tell correct from
incorrect use without human inspection. But these data-hiding patterns
are intended for use within super-patterns like hAudio that tell parsers
what to expect. Distinguishing data-hiding patterns of this sort from
keyword stuffing sounds like a trivial programming task, so I think
search engines surely would be able to distinguish between them.)
5. This problem only occurs with non-linking A. (But by its very nature,
markup that hides content from most users, most of the time — and that
includes /all/ patterns that hide data in TITLE attributes — is
susceptible to keyword stuffing. Indeed, I would bet that each and every
one of these patterns is already being abused by black-hat SEOs,
effectually or not.)
NB: This email isn't intended as a general endorsement of TITLE on
non-linking A. I'm deeply sceptical about misusing the TITLE attribute
for human-unfriendly data, especially on anything other than an empty
SPAN. I'm just saying I don't buy Martin's SEO-based argument against
non-linking A in particular.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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