Hover texts for hyperlinks

[Bio-RadAbs]

I've seen certain websites upon hovering your mouse over the hyperlink, text is displayed. Concept is similar to the IMG ALT tag.

Do you think there is value when it comes to hyperlinks? It's already an anchor link.

Thoughts?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The link title element is not known to be a significant ranking factor. In fact, stuffing this attribute with keywords might even have the opposite effect.

This is one of those cases where you ask "what's best for the user?"

[NaescentAdam]

Yeah, if you have other things to concentrate on I would do them. Personally I'd only do it as a UI point.

Good luck

[Bio-RadAbs]

Thanks Adam,

It seems the general idea is to not see it as a priority but it's an unknown territory. No one is a 100% sure.

I'm going to leave it out for now, there could be webmasters stuffing titles with keywords thinking it has a benefit and that might be an area Google will come down on with an update.

[NaescentAdam]

Hi there,

There was a question on this a while back by the Moz community. Some respected people were answering that question. It seems the consensus was little if any.

http://moz.com/community/q/does-the-link-title-attribute-benefit-seo

Although it might help with context for the search engines....

Try this aswell

http://www.googlewatchblog.de/wp-content/uploads/rankingfaktoren_google.jpg

Adam

[PaddyDisplays]

The article is 6 years old, a just far to out of date in the seo world!

When I first started on "seo" I found a 2007-8 article on link sculpting you site Nav with No follow.  Then after doing a ton of work applying this to the the site Nav I found out it all changed in 2009, and it was now a terrible Idea!

[Bio-RadAbs]

You're right, I do feel the link titles are more of a hidden element that isn't necessary. If the copy is linking to another page, naturally the text should flow into it and the anchor text should do its job of informing the user about the page.

I did think having it might backfire and SEs would start thinking i'm keyword stuffing.

Didn't think about touch screen devices, great point.

[DougRoberts]

If the user needs to read the title text to understand the link then you've probably got your anchor text and context wrong. Using them just to get a few additional keywords in your copy isn't going to help and might actually act as a distraction/source of confusion for users...

... and touch screen device users find it hard to hover.

[Bio-RadAbs]

Now that I know what they are "link titles", I was able to find this old (but useful) article on moz

Link Title Attribute and its SEO Benefit

http://moz.com/ugc/link-tilte-attribute-and-its-seo-benefit

The comments section really fleshes out some good points even if the article is 4 years old. Recent comments SEs don't consider title, hmm...

[PaddyDisplays]

Little if any I would have thought, but to be honest I have never looked into it.  Think it of it as a tool tip, giving a bit more info for the user.  If it helps the user then use it, if not then don't

edit:  Here is an old topic asking the same thing (hope that helps)

http://moz.com/community/q/link-title-with-anchor-text

[Bio-RadAbs]

Any SEO value in adding it though? What do you think? Will it just lead to stuffing?

[PaddyDisplays]

The value your looking for is "title"  eg:

link link