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
-
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 -
"Equity sculpting" with internal nofollow links
I’ve been trying a couple of new site auditor services this week and they have both flagged the fact that I have some nofollow links to internal pages. I see this subject has popped up from time to time in this community. I also found a 2013 Matt Cutts video on the subject: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links At a couple of SEO conferences I’ve attended this year, I was advised that nofollow on internal links can be useful so as not to squander link juice on secondary (but necessary) pages. I suspect many websites have a lot of internal links in their footers and are sharing the love with pages which don’t really need to be boosted. These pages can still be indexed but not given a helping hand to rank by strong pages. This “equity sculpting” (I made that up) seems to make sense to me, but am I missing something? Examples of these secondary pages include login pages, site maps (human readable), policies – arguably even the general contact page. Thoughts? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Warren_Vick
Warren1 -
GWT - International Targeting
By selecting a country in the Country Targeting section of GWT what effect does this have? For example if I select UK will this boost rankings on google.co.uk and decrease them on google.com etc? If we are based in the UK but our customer base is worldwide should we not select anything?
Technical SEO | | twitime0 -
Will a google map loaded "on scroll" be ignored by the crawler?
One of my pages has two Google maps on it. This leads to a fairly high keyword density for words like "data", "map data" etc. Since one of the maps is basically at the bottom of the page I thought of loading it "on scroll" as soon as its container becomes visible (before loading the map div should be empty). Will the map then still be craweld by google (can they execute the JS in a way that the map is loaded anyways?) or would this help to reduce the keywords introduced by the maps?
Technical SEO | | ddspg0 -
Does img src="http: count as a link?
Hi All I have looked in WMT and it says I am getting a lot of links from 1 affiliate - they have 100,000 pages on their site but GWT is showing me 200,000 links from their domain - each of their pages has the following code. Mysite I think we have Nofollowed the link but does the img src="http://www.site.co.uk/affiliate/affiliation-images/470x80.gif also act as a link and if so do I need to Nofollow that too? The image is stored on our server so the affiliate is linking to the banner image on our server. Would something such as this affect my rankings in a negative way? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MotoringSEO1 -
Google Penguin - Target Landing Page
Hello, One of our sites have been hit by the first penguin update back in April and ever since then we have been removing links and submitting reconsideration requests... It only seems to have affected our home page as some of our internal landing pages are still ranking OK in the SERPS #1 / #2. I'm just wondering if we created a landing page for this keyword and drove high quality / relevant links to this landing page could we get it to rank higher than our homepage even though our Homepage is on the 5th page.Hope the above make sense. Has anybody had any joy with this?
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
My site has a "Reported Web Forgery!" warning
When I check my bing cached page it comes up with a "Reported Web Forgery!" warning. I've looked at google web tools and no malware has been detected. I do have another site that has a very similar web address jaaronwoodcountertops.com and jaaron-wood-countertops.com. Could that be why? How do I go about letting bing and or firefox know this is not a forgery site?
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
Moz Crawl Reporting Duplicate content on "template" styled pages
We have a lot of detail pages on our site that reference specific scholarships. Each page has a different Title and Description. They also have unique information all regarding the same data points. The pages are displayed in a similar structure to the user so the data is easy to read. My problem is a lot of these pages are being reported as duplicate content when they certainly are not. Most of them are reported as duplicates when they have the same sponsor. They may have the same contact information listed. These two are being reported as duplicate of each other. They share some data but they are definitely different scholarships. http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/adelaide-mcclelland-garden-club-scholarship/9254/ http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/mary-wannamaker-witt-and-lee-hampton-witt-memorial-scholarship/10785/ Would it help to add a Canonical for each page to themselves? Any other suggestions would be great. Thanks
Technical SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0