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.
How do you mark a quote HTML wise?
-
Hi,
As far as I know, in the past Italic was used to emphasize (similar use to Bold).
Now I've seen people use Italic for quotations. Is that the correct thing to do for an entire paragraph or is it a problem for Google wise?
Thanks
-
Well, there are a few HTML elements that you can use with being the standard for a quote and
being for a quote from another site or source.
With regards to duplication, I am not really sure I have ever come across a hard and fast rule here so tend to think the standard rules apply and if you have a good percentage of unique content on the page then having a few quotes won't matter. That is likely as true if you use italics, q or blockquote.
From my perspective, I would use blockquote to indicate it was from an external source and not worry about so long as 90% of my page was not quoted from an external source.
What you can't do is pinch content from another source and just wrap it up in blockquotes and call it good.

Seriously though, I quote things in my blog posts all the time so keep the unique ratio high and this is not something to worry about.
The HTML quote details can be found in more detail over at w3c schools:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_q.asp
If you google around this topic, you won't find much, a good indicator that people are not having duplication problems due to quotes and citations else the internet would be moaning about it.
Hope that helps.
Marcus -
Actually you can made it bold or italic or underline, whatever you want. The most important is to put your text between
tag, which show Google that it is quote.
I personally do it in Italic and I never had any issue with Google. In bold you can make some of the important keywords, this will help you a little with on-page optimisation.
Thanks,
Russel
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 Search Console "Text too small to read" Errors
What are the guidelines / best practices for clearing these errors? Google has some pretty vague documentation on how to handle this sort of error. User behavior metrics in GA are pretty much in line with desktop usage and don't show anything concerning Any input is appreciated! Thanks m3F3uOI
Technical SEO | | Digital_Reach2 -
Error report in Bing Evaluated size of HTML....
Hi Whilst checking Bing's SEO analyser I got this error message for our page www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases "Evaluated size of HTML is estimated to be over 125 KB and risks not being fully cached. (Issue marker for this rule is not visible in the current view)" Just wondering what needs to be done about it and what it actually means? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
What is the best way to refresh a webpage of a news site, SEO wise?
Hello all, we have a client which is a sports website. In fact it is a veyr big website and has a huge number of news per day. This is mostly the reason why it refreshes some of its pages with news list every 420 seconds. We currently use meta refresh. I have read here and elsewhere that meta refreshes should be avoided. But we don't do it to send to another page and pass any kind of page authority / juice. Is in this case javascript refresh better? Is there any other better way. What do you think & suggest? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | pkontopoulos0 -
New "Static" Site with 302s
Hey all, Came across a bit of an interesting challenge recently, one that I was hoping some of you might have had experience with! We're currently in the process of a website rebuild, for which I'm really excited. The new site is using Markdown to create an entirely static site. Load-times are fantastic, and the code is clean. Life is good, apart from the 302s. One of the weird quirks I've realized is that with oldschool, non-server-generated page content is that every page of the site is an Index.html file in a directory. The resulting in a www.website.com/page-title will 302 to www.website.com/page-title/. My solution off the bat has been to just be super diligent and try to stay on top of the link profile and send lots of helpful emails to the staff reminding them about how to build links, but I know that even the best laid plans often fail. Has anyone had a similar challenge with a static site and found a way to overcome it?
Technical SEO | | danny.wood1 -
For an image which is in the CSS and not the HTML, can you add an alt tag?
I would like to improve SEO on a page with three big images, which are currently hosted in the CSS. The sample I am working with is at http://xquisitevents.com/about-us/ and I put my cursor over the big picture of the wedding dress with bouquet, I inspected the element and saw this code in a div tag: #upperleft { background-image:url(images/AboutTopLeft.jpg); Can I add an alt tag to the CSS somehow, or can I have it added to the HTML? What is the best way to handle this, to include keywords like exquisite weddings and special event designs?
Technical SEO | | BridgetGibbons0 -
Wordpress "incoming search terms" plugin
Hello everyone! newbie to SEO and have been trying to keep everything nice and ethical but I've seen on a couple of blogs today "incoming search terms" at the bottom of the blogs, then a bullet pointed list of search terms beneath it. So I had a quick search about the use of it and noticed wordpress has a plugin that automatic ally generates these "incoming search terms". I ask is this a legitimate plugin or will this harm my blog? I assume it generally will as I can't see this being much use for the audience, rather it would be 100% for trying to lure in search engines.
Technical SEO | | acecream0 -
Why "title missing or empty" when title tag exists?
Greetings! On Dec 1, 2011 in a SEOMoz campaign, two crawl metrics shot up from zero (Nov 17, Nov 24). "Title missing or empty" was 9,676. "Duplicate page content" was 9,678. Whoa! Content at site has not changed. I checked a sample of web pages and each seems to have a proper TITLE tag. Page content differs as well -- albeit we list electronic part numbers of hard-to-find parts, which look similar. I found a similar post http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-crawl-error-title-missing-or-empty-when-there-is-already-title-and-meta-desciption-in-place . In answer, Sha ran Screaming Frog crawler. I ran Frog crawler on a few hundred pages. Titles were found and hash codes were unique. Hmmm. Site with errors is http://electronics1.usbid.com Small sample of pages with errors: electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_10.html
Technical SEO | | groovykarma
electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_100.html
electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_1000.html I've tried to reproduce errors yet I cannot. What am I missing please? Thanks kindly, Loren0 -
How do I redirect index.html to the root / ?
The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0