Target="_blank"
-
Do href links that leave a site and use target="_blank" to open a new tab impact SEO?
-
Short answer: Highly doubt it.
Long answer: I haven't seen anything from any of the ranking factors Moz, or anyone else produces, that would indicate so.
And under normal linking I can't imagine a situation that would cause a User based issue (like increased bounces because you got launched in another window), unless it's really excessive.
For example, I deal with professional photographers sites, and they sometimes have a portfolio site, and a blog, and sometimes they are two different systems with two different experiences and often times open the other in a new window. That is very annoying and a can kill a user's experience and they end up with high bounce rates.I think if you're just sending links to other useful sites, target="_blank" is perfectly fine to use. I do it on my site all the time.
-
Nope, its simply a link. I use them routinely for outgoing links myself.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Quick Fix to "Duplicate page without canonical tag"?
When we pull up Google Search Console, in the Index Coverage section, under the category of Excluded, there is a sub-category called ‘Duplicate page without canonical tag’. The majority of the 665 pages in that section are from a test environment. If we were to include in the robots.txt file, a wildcard to cover every URL that started with the particular root URL ("www.domain.com/host/"), could we eliminate the majority of these errors? That solution is not one of the 5 or 6 recommended solutions that the Google Search Console Help section text suggests. It seems like a simple effective solution. Are we missing something?
Technical SEO | | CREW-MARKETING1 -
SEO Troubleshooting? Not ranking in Top 50 for "easy" keyword
Hi there, First of all, thank you in advance to whoever steps in to help me with this issue! So, I have a new site (launched December 2016) in the investing space and have been able to get page 1 rankings on some of my pages. One of my best ranking pages is for the phrase "what is xiv". The Keyword Explorer has this phrase at a 21 difficulty. My page for this keyword is https://www.projectoption.com/what-is-xiv/. The post reached the first page almost immediately after being published, though I know I shouldn't expect this for other keywords of similar difficulty. Here is my problem: I just wrote a comprehensive guide (8,000+ words) on a different keyword phrase: "vertical spreads." The Keyword Explorer has this phrase at a 25 difficulty. My page for this topic: https://www.projectoption.com/vertical-spreads-explained/. However, the page is nowhere to be found in organic Google rankings (not in top 50), and the page has been live for a few weeks now. I've done my best at optimizing the post, but something leads me to believe there are some issues that are beyond my SEO knowledge. For example, maybe the post is too long, and Google can't figure out what the page is about. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your time! -Chris
Technical SEO | | cbutler222930 -
Redirect our www.website.com to website. Com/target-keyword
Dear moz community I have been analyzing the websites that rank in top 20 for our target keywords. All of the top 20 sites except us have their websites re directing to websites.com/target keyword. This is due to probably because they have multiple city's and one of the target keywords term is cityname + word. My question is and idea - make a 301 to our www.website.com to /city-keyword and start linking to that page with new links. Would that bring any benefit? Seems that it's a very strong ranking signal. Any threats that I must take into account? We currently rank as #9
Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud0 -
"Url blocked by robots.txt." on my Video Sitemap
I'm getting a warning about "Url blocked by robots.txt." on my video sitemap - but just for youtube videos? Has anyone else encountered this issue, and how did you fix it if so?! Thanks, J
Technical SEO | | Critical_Mass0 -
Looking for feedback about "look-ahead" navigation
Our company has been creating websites where the navigation is developed in such a way as to allow the visitor to get a preview of the image and/or content on that is on the page. Here are two websites that use this technology:
Technical SEO | | TopFloor
http://www.uniquepadprinting.com/
http://www.empathia.com/ (On this site, the previews are only available if you click on "Whole", "Productive" or "Safe" at the top of the page. I'm looking for feedback such as: What do you call this type of navigation (We call it look-ahead, but I can't find much info that term on the web) Have you experienced any issues with this type of navigation? Do you have any recommendations on it? Some of the things we've seen are: It adds the same content to every page of the website It creates a lot of internal links It can create a lot of code on pages It can slow page-load times0 -
How valuable is content "hidden" behind a JavaScript dropdown really?
I've come across a method implemented by some SEO agencies to fill up pages with somehow relevant text and hide it behind a javascript dropdown. Does Google fall for such cheap tricks? You can see this method used on these pages for example (just scroll down to the bottom) - it's all in German, but you get the idea I guess: http://www.insider-boersenbrief.de/ http://www.deko-und-kerzenshop.de/ How is you experience with this way of adding content to a site? Do you think it is valuable or will it get penalised?
Technical SEO | | jfkorn0 -
Meta tag "noindex,nofollow" by accident
Hi, 3 weeks ago I wanted to release a new website (made in WordPress), so I neatly created 301 redirects for all files and folders of my old html website and transferred the WordPress site into the index folder. Job well done I thought, but after a few days, my site suddenly disappeared from google. I read in other Q&A's that this could happen so I waited a little longer till I finally saw today that there was a meta robots added on every page with "noindex, nofollow". For some reason, the WordPress setting "I want to forbid search engines, but allow normal visitors to my website" was selected, although I never even opened that section called "Privacy". So my question is, will this have a negative impact on my pagerank afterwards? Thanks, Sven
Technical SEO | | Zitana0 -
Honeypot Captcha - rated as "cloaked content"?
Hi guys, in order to get rid of our very old-school captcha on our contact form at troteclaser.com, we would like to use a honeypot captcha. The idea is to add a field that is hidden to human visitors but likely to be filled in by spam-bots. In this way we can sort our all those spam contact requests.
Technical SEO | | Troteclaser
More details on "honeypot captchas":
http://haacked.com/archive/2007/09/11/honeypot-captcha.aspx Any idea if this single cloaked field will have negative SEO-impacts? Or is there another alternative to keep out those spam-bots? Greets from Austria,
Thomas0