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[textile] SEO Friendly mod: Giving all links a title by default
In the world of SEO and whatnot, using links with no title tag is not optimal. Having to write the linked text, AND the title text, i.e…
"Automatic Recognition(Automatic Recognition)":http://...
…becomes laborious quite quickly, and goes against the speed of writing in textile.
A quick mod to classTextile.php, line 760:
From:
$atts .= ($title != '') ? ' title="' . $this->encode_html($title) . '"' : '';
To:
$atts .= ($title != '') ? ' title="' . $this->encode_html($title) . '"' : ' title="' . $this->encode_html($text) . '"';
If you do not supply a specific title, it uses the link text by default. You only ever need type it once, in the shortest style.
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Re: [textile] SEO Friendly mod: Giving all links a title by default
Yeah, but that’s irritating for users. The point of link text is to describe the link; the title attribute is for clarification. "Automatic Recognition(Automatic Recognition)":http://... is redundant, since the link text clearly describes the link.
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Re: [textile] SEO Friendly mod: Giving all links a title by default
I never said use it in all circumstances. The reason is to stop you linking without a title tag.
You cannot expect all users to write descriptive link titles – that just will not happen. The vast majority do not even realise they exist. At least this way there is a relevant tag, which is far better than none at all.
Last edited by rossharvey (2007-05-18 13:46:01)
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Re: [textile] SEO Friendly mod: Giving all links a title by default
Not sure this is a Textile issue. It may be more of a “Textpattern’s use of Textile” issue.
Anyway, wet_quicklink handle that.
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Re: [textile] SEO Friendly mod: Giving all links a title by default
Jeremie wrote:
Not sure this is a Textile issue. It may be more of a “Textpattern’s use of Textile” issue.
Anyway, wet_quicklink handle that.
That was my initial thought too, but Textile is always growing in popularity (more implementations), and it should be robust enough to handle tabs, regardless of the context.
Last edited by rossharvey (2007-05-18 23:01:17)
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Re: [textile] SEO Friendly mod: Giving all links a title by default
I’m not sure what you mean by “handle tabs”…
The thing is, simply duplicating the text link as title has no purpose, at all. It doesn’t improve the human readability, it doesn’t improve the machine readability (including the search engine bots).
However, having a good title is necessary. Inside Textpattern, there are a number of situations where the software could feed Textile the data, like article’s title, and the like.
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Re: [textile] SEO Friendly mod: Giving all links a title by default
Jeremie wrote:
I’m not sure what you mean by “handle tabs”…
Apologies – got wires crossed with the tab character bug in another thread!
I was under the impression search engines didn’t like empty title tags. If thats changed and they are ignored if identical then I stand corrected :¬)
I’ll checkout wet_quicklink.
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Re: [textile] SEO Friendly mod: Giving all links a title by default
rossharvey wrote:
I was under the impression search engines didn’t like empty title tags.
I’m not sure that was, or is, the case. I don’t see why they wouldn’t.
They don’t like the absence of or empty alt attribute, but that’s a different story (and they are right on this one).
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