Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is using a Href in Div OK?
-
Hi,
I was just wondering what your thoughts are on using a Href in a Div, which contains anchor text. We currently use the Href on the div, as opposed to just the anchor text as I want the whole div to be clickable as opposed to just the anchor text.
So currently I have:
Keword 1
Keyword 2Is this perfectly fine to do it like this as opposed to using <a tags="" ???<br="">I suppose there are various alternatives - if you must use the</a><a tag="" like:<="" p=""></a>
However I would assume a search engine is smart enought to know its the same thing???
Thanks
-
Many thanks - I'm going to have a serious word with my coders!!
-
As Dave shared, the W3C is the official organization for determining the validity of code. Generally speaking, you want your code to be valid.
If you want an area to be a click-able link try Maximise's suggestion.
-
Jesus - Thanks.
So your telling me that its totally invalud to:
1/. Wrap a href tag around a div tag.2/. Put a href tag as an atribute on a div tag.
If that is the case I'm going to have so serious words with my coders!!
-
Any time I have a question about valid HTML I go to the Source. W3C has an invaluable tool for HTML . Becoming familiar with this will help you always create clean code.
-
I would try and stay clear of doing this to be honest. It won't validate, older browsers may have problems with it and I'm not sure how search engines would treat it (they may not follow it). There are better ways to do it.
If you set your anchor tag to 'display:block' you can then set the height and width too. This way the whole div would be the link, not just the text.
-
Neither option is valid HTML. Browser behavior and crawler behavior would be unpredictable.
The code would be something like:
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
-
What Tools Should I Use To Investigate Damage to my website
I would like to know what tools I should use and how to investigate damage to my website in2town.co.uk I hired a person to do some work to my website but they damaged it. That person was on a freelance platform and was removed because of all the complaints made about them. They also put in backdoors on websites including mine and added content. I also had a second problem where my content was being stolen. My site always did well and had lots of keywords in the top five and ten, but now they are not even in the top 200. This happened in January and feb. When I write unique articles, they are not showing in Google and need to find what the problem is and how to fix it. Can anyone please help
Technical SEO | | blogwoman10 -
Unsolved Using NoIndex Tag instead of 410 Gone Code on Discontinued products?
Hello everyone, I am very new to SEO and I wanted to get some input & second opinions on a workaround I am planning to implement on our Shopify store. Any suggestions, thoughts, or insight you have are welcome & appreciated! For those who aren't aware, Shopify as a platform doesn't allow us to send a 410 Gone Code/Error under any circumstance. When you delete or archive a product/page, it becomes unavailable on the storefront. Unfortunately, the only thing Shopify natively allows me to do is set up a 301 redirect. So when we are forced to discontinue a product, customers currently get a 404 error when trying to go to that old URL. My planned workaround is to automatically detect when a product has been discontinued and add the NoIndex meta tag to the product page. The product page will stay up but be unavailable for purchase. I am also adjusting the LD+JSON to list the products availability as Discontinued instead of InStock/OutOfStock.
Technical SEO | | BakeryTech
Then I let the page sit for a few months so that crawlers have a chance to recrawl and remove the page from their indexes. I think that is how that works?
Once 3 or 6 months have passed, I plan on archiving the product followed by setting up a 301 redirect pointing to our internal search results page. The redirect will send the to search with a query aimed towards similar products. That should prevent people with open tabs, bookmarks and direct links to that page from receiving a 404 error. I do have Google Search Console setup and integrated with our site, but manually telling google to remove a page obviously only impacts their index. Will this work the way I think it will?
Will search engines remove the page from their indexes if I add the NoIndex meta tag after they have already been index?
Is there a better way I should implement this? P.S. For those wondering why I am not disallowing the page URL to the Robots.txt, Shopify won't allow me to call collection or product data from within the template that assembles the Robots.txt. So I can't automatically add product URLs to the list.0 -
Canonical homepage link uses trailing slash while default homepage uses no trailing slash, will this be an issue?
Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Ok to internally link to pages with NOINDEX?
I manage a directory site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. I want to remove a significant number of these pages from the index using NOINDEX and have 2 questions about this: 1. Is NOINDEX the most effective way to remove large numbers of pages from Google's index? 2. The IA of our site means that we will have thousands of internal links pointing to these noindexed pages if we make this change. Is it a problem to link to pages with a noindex directive on them? Thanks in advance for all responses.
Technical SEO | | OMGPyrmont0 -
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png
Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI0 -
I can buy a domain from a competitor. Whats the best way to make good use of these links for my existing website
I can buy a domain from a competitor. Whats the best way to make good use of these links for my existing website
Technical SEO | | Archers0 -
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0 -
Starting a new product, should we use new domain or subdomain
I'm working with a company that has a high page rank on it's main domain and is looking to launch a new business / product offering. They are evaluating either creating a subdomain or launching a brand new domain. In either case, their current site will link contextually to the new site. Is there one method that would be better for SEO than the other? The new business / product is related to the main offering, but may appeal to different / new customers. The new business / product does need it's own homepage and will have a different conversion funnel than the existing business.
Technical SEO | | gallantc0
