Some considerations about title attribute of links

As many web developers/seos know, contents of TITLE attribute of tag A are not returned when a specific search is performed. Same for linked documents: title attribute seems not to influence target page’s ranking.

By the way, before publishing this article I’ve made some further observations by examinating a document with the following specs:

1. “white hat” usage of the title attribute (no keyword stuffing, no seo ’stink’);
2. the content of title attribute is unique (it doesn’t appear anywhere else in the html code);
3. the content of title attribute doesn’t even appear in linked resource contents;
4. both the linking page and target page are published on websites which are remarkable and popular, no penalization applied.

Nothing is changed at this time: title attribute’s content still seems to be ignored by Google. From a human perspective therefore, the attribute title is not considered and it doesn’t engrave on ranking neither of the linked resource, nor of the linking resource.

The 3 reasons why seo’s may want to use title attribute on links

1. the fact that Google (maybe) doesn’t index the content of the title, doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t consider it. What publicly appears to be cached and available may not coincide with (or limited to) what Google weigths when scoring and ranking documents in its index.

2. When building a web page, a copywriter, or a seo-copywriter, should use all the tags and all the attributes made available by the consortium W3C. The title attribute has a precise purpose in a well compiled web page: its proper usage, is not only recommended, but morally obligatory.

3. The “value” of a link is also measured considering how many times it is followed by users. Needless to say a well compiled, marketing oriented, title appearing as a tooltip when consumers’ mouse pointer passes on the anchor text, can drastically increase the chances users click on it.
Therefore, perhaps the attribute doesn’t have direct influence but the indirect influence on ranking could be terrific (just like meta description can increase CTR).

The 3 reasons why seo’s may not want to use title attribute of links

1. An extensive usage of this attribute sensitively increases the download time of the page, because of an increase of textual informations (which the engine probably throws back and therefore they don’t directly influence the scoring of document).

2. The title attribute is a generic attribute that can be added to any tags (except title, head, html, meta, param, script, basefont). As name implies, it provides an advisory of the tag in which is set. There would not be therefore surprising if search engines retained this type of information superfluous when assigning topic and importance to a document.

3. Even algorithms which are supposed to appraise “aesthetics” (ok, I couldn’be more vulgar, but that’s the point) of links (i.e. estimating position inside the page, headings, bold, strong etc ) as for instance WLR (Weighted Links Rank) * happily bypass the title attribute.

* note: as for all the algorithms, whose papers are publicly available, it is not absolutely sure that it is implemented in Google information retrieval algos.

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