Google Notes of Note: Title Attribute Abuse
An interesting note from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable today… Barry spotted a thread over on the Google Webmaster Help forums, where Googler John Mueller (aka JohnMu) noted that a particular site had approximately 3 metric tons of text stuffed into title attribute of links, and said:
To our algorithms, that might look a bit sneaky — and in practice, it doesn’t make that much sense, so I’d recommend going through your pages and making sure that you’re using title-attributes as they would normally be used.
In case you have no idea what I am talking about – the title attribute is used on images and links to provide a “tool tip” when you mouse over it. So a sensible title attribute for a link might say “click to sign up” but there’s not much point in even doing that, if the link already says the same thing.
Anyway – this is the first time I’ve heard this specific issue raised in public by a Googler, but it’s consistent with what we’ve been seeing in the “Penguin cases” I’m working with.
A number of folks who were hit had learned from some-guy-who-called-himself-an-SEO-expert that they should stuff keywords into the title attribute of images and links. That’s a Ridiculously Terrible Idea™ – and in fact, at the time, none of the major search engines was even indexing the title attribute as content. It was a total waste of time, at best. Which is what I’ve been telling people for years – “waste of time, don’t do it.”
For all I know, they’re still not indexing that attribute (they shouldn’t be, but we’ll run that test again) – but in the thread Barry found, the site in question actually uses so much text in there, that the actual text behind the “tool tip” isn’t even fully visible with the mouse pointing at it.
This points at Google looking for “spam signals” even in places where what you are doing would have no impact on their algorithms. Which the results of the Penguin update already hinted at pretty strongly, no?
As a result, I’m officially changing my recommendation from “stuffing keywords in your meta description means fewer people will click on your search listing, so don’t do it” to “stuffing keywords into your description tag is not just stupid, it’s also risky, so don’t do it.” Please adjust your explanations to clients accordingly.
Before anyone asks, you should also not “stuff” your keywords meta tag. If you have one. In fact, my recommendation remains “do not even bother using a meta keywords tag.”
That’s all – just thought this was interesting, and potentially important to some people out there.
Thanks!
Dan
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What exactly is considered stuffing the keywords in the description tag? I never stuff them in there to where it doesn’t make sense, but I do spend time purposely adding them in there once or twice.
I wouldn’t worry about one use. I have trouble imagining how you’d use keywords more than once in a meta description – there’s not very much space on the SERP for the meta description to display.
Also, I had another question. I run a wordpress site where it requires me to add a title attribute for images. Do you think it would look spammy if I added the same alt tag into the title attribute?
I don’t like rewriting them 2 times. What are your thoughts?
Eric, you can leave the title attribute of images blank, just like the alt attribute. Try it one time in WordPress, and you’ll be scratching your head, wondering why they label it as a required field, when you can leave it blank.
May I suggest something to the tune of Green Eggs and Ham, perhaps Stuffing Keywords and SPAM?
I had a real question before my other post, sorry.
Does your advice also extend to the longdesc and name attributes on images?
Neil, I haven’t seen anything from any search engine about those attributes specifically, but…
1) The longdesc attribute is intended to contain the URL for a longer description of the image. It is an accessibility feature. Stuffing that attribute with keywords would be a very insane act.
2) The name attribute is used for scripting. Your scripts don’t care if name=”vw9gj0g98″ and your scripts don’t need keywords to work. Stuffing that attribute with keywords would be senseless. It would also be senseless for Google to worry about this attribute since it is not visible to humans.
Well when I’ve put long paragraphs in the title tag it’s when I’m using the jQuery qTip tooltip plugin which by default uses the content within the title tag to create a styled popup tooltip with a close button.
It seems to me that if Google is going to suddenly consider this practice worthy of a 3 month (or perhaps permanent penalty) then maybe they could notify webmasters of this change of policy prior to unleashing their wrath.
If in fact, webmasters are using the title tag to stuff keywords then this is the perfect example of what is so horribly flawed with the Penguin update. The innocent sites are taked down with the guilty. The qTip jQuery plugin is one of the most popular plugins and I wonder how much collateral damage there has been.
Don, I’m trying to think of some way for that to not be obnoxious if I were just trying to click a link, but assuming that there’s some use for it, you aren’t doing that on every link, are you?
Not doing it on standard links. Doing it on images of question marks where further details ate required. Google Adsense does something similiar but with JavaScript.
Also possible on text wrapped in a span tag with title attribute with a thin underline under the word.
I wouldn’t be worried about that stuff, Don.
My wordpress theme automatically completes the title tag for the links it generates, making it the title of the page that the link is pointing to. As you say, completely superfluous since the anchor text is the title anyway. Do you think there is any risk involved in that?
I hope not – Don’t fancy trawling through all the PHP files looking for every instance where the theme does this!
Pete, it’s pretty normal behavior for WordPress to repeat the text of the link in the title attribute, in automatically generated links – e.g. a recent posts widget that uses the title of a post as anchor text in linking to that post.
That’s STUPID, because it completely misses the point of the title attribute for anchors, but it’s not automatically spam.
W3C has some examples to illustrate the actual intent of this attribute: www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.1.4
The “idea” is that you use a title to clarify what’s behind a link, warn people that the link will open in a new window, etc.
All things in moderation. Works in life…(probably) works in SEO.