Empty <a>tag (no href or name attribute specificed) potential effect on link juice</a>
-
I have a client that insists on using the ProPhoto WordPress theme. This theme has an interesting habit of putting empty anchor tags in the site nav in order to nest css dropdowns. By empty I mean totally empty. For example:
<a>Navigation Link</a>
Since the anchor does not specify a destiation, do you think it would have any effect on link juice one way or the other? This wouldn't count as an additional link on the page would it?
My inclination and personal practice is not to risk quirky things like this, but I'd like a second opinion before I suggest changes to the client's site.
Thanks!
-
I've been thinking about this one too. And my inital reaction is that it doesn't count. Another thread at Google backs me up, http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7778313784ba6db5&hl=en
I'd go with that it doesn't, not unless the href is present.
-
I know! I searched far and wide and found no discussion on this at all which was both surprising and frustrating. The lack of information is what led me to post the question because surely someone has encountered this at somepoint, right!?
-
Thanks for the feedback Barry. it is much appreciated. I tend to agree that the href would be a far more probable trigger for determining what is actually a link than the <a>itself.</a>
<a>I just want to make sure I give the best possible advice to my client, but I am starting to lean toward this being something of a non-issue the more I think about it.</a>
<a>To answer your question regarding how the nav works: In this case the :hover css pseudo-class on the empty</a> <a>tag causes the nested sub-menu with actual links to become visible. The empty</a> <a>is nothing but a trigger for the sub-menu.</a>
<a>Cheers!
Dameian</a>
-
I've been having a think about this one and while I'm not sure, I'm going to say I don't think it wouldn't have an effect on link juice passing. As in if there were 4 links and an empty anchor the juice would be divided by 4 and not 5.
Current W3 anchor use - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.1.3 - allows for various parameters in the <a>tag, however I'm willing to bet (not a huge sum of money though) that the href itself triggers the link part of a link (and am I right saying even js links need href="#" or similar to trigger?).</a>
<a>Plus I think older versions of HTML allowed things other than links within anchors (though I may be making that up) so if the engines have grown around those older versions it makes sense they look for something other than the 'a' in the tag to work.
I can't think of a good way to test though, maybe somebody can clarify my thinking or tell me if I'm wrong.
I agree with you though that it's not wise to put quirky elements like this on a page, especially if there's a lot of dropdowns. How do the navigation links work if there's no href?</a>
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
-
Google Sites website https://www.opcfitness.com/ title NOT GOOD FOR SEO
We set up a website https://www.opcfitness.com/home on google sites. but google sites page title not good for SEO. How to fix it?
Technical SEO | | ahislop5740 -
From: http://www. to https://
Hi all, I am changing my hosting for legal and SEO reasons from http://www to https:// . Now I hear different stories on the redirects: 1: should i try and change my backlinks? 2: internally all links will be 301 redirected at first. Than I want to (manually) change them. It;s within Wordpress so there should be a plugin for this. Tips? 3: Will it affect my rankings and for what period? What I now know that at first it will drop little but eventually you will rank higher than before. Thanks so much in advance! Tymen
Technical SEO | | Tymen1 -
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
Unnatural links to your site--impacts links
Hi, I just recive a "nice" Massage at my WMT- Unnatural links to your site—impacts links _Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more._Did someone here came across any massage like this before?if so, any suggestion on what to so next?Whould love for some help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Followed Linking Root Domains and No Followed Linking Domains
If you have more NoFollowed Linking Root Domains than Followed Linking Root Domains is that a problem?
Technical SEO | | INN0 -
Canonical tag problem
Hello I'm newbie here i dont know very well about seo but i would like to ask your help? I'm running report about my website and on report I dont have canonical tag on my products. But if i check from on page report link by link it shows that I have canonical tag. At the same time if i check my pages code i can see below canonical tag codes? Do we use canonical tags wrong? What can cause this different information? Could you please help me? Is it important to use canonical tag beginning or end? I'm using now trial version and trying to understand report is correct what is my mistakes. Thanks in advance My code is
Technical SEO | | FRUTIKO0 -
/~username
Hello, The utility on this site that crawls your site and highlights what it sees as potential problems reported an issue with /~username access seeing it as duplicate content i.e. mydomain.com/file.htm is the same as mydomain.com~/username/file.htm so I went to my server hosts and they disabled it using mod_userdir but GWT now gives loads of 404 errors. Have I gone about this the wrong way or was it not really a problem in the first place or have I fixed something that wasn't broken and made things worse? Thanks, Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Link juice distributed to too many pages. Will noindex,follow fix this?
We have an e-commerce store with around 4000 product pages. Although our domain authority is not very high (we launched our site in February and now have around 30 RD's) we did rank on lots of long tail terms, and generated around 8000 organic visits / month. Two weeks ago we added another 2000 products to our existing catalogue of 2000 products, and since then our organic traffic dropped significantly (more than 50%). My guess is that link juice has been distributed to too many pages, causing rankings to drop on overall. I'm thinking about noindexing 50% of the product pages (the ones not receiving any organic traffic). However, I am not sure if this will lead to more link juice for the remaining 50% of the product pages, or not. So my question is: if I noindex,follow page A, will 100% of the linkjuice go to page B INSTEAD of page A, or will just a part of the link juice flow to page B (after flowing through page A first)? Hope my question is clear 🙂 P.s. We have a Dutch store, so the traffic drop is not a Panda issue 🙂
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0