Use of title tags on divs for SEO purposes

[JarnoNijzing]

Hello community,

I recently was asked by a client to analyze a website of a competitor. I did was he asked me to do but when I  looked at the source code of the website I found this code:

I changed the exact words into something for privacy reasons, but I never looked at a code like this.
Using a div for an anchor I get but adding a title tag to the div? I never seen that before. Title tags on anchors, yes, using images in divs as background and then adding a title???

Does anyone have any experience with a code like this and if you do how does this impact rankings? Does it impact rankings at all and does anybody know of any correlation between the two?

Looking forward for your responses.

Regards

Jarno

[STL]

Hi Jarno

When a title parameter is added to a tag most browsers will render it as a tooltip when the mouse is hovered over it. So there's a neat (if possibly annoying) feature of it. Furthermore some CMS applications like to flag everything up with a title when they are shown in Edit mode as content blocks.

When it comes to SEO I'm not aware of it being used by Google for anything other than an IMG or A tag. Happy to be proven wrong though!

Rich

[TomRayner]

I'm fairly sure that the Googlebot ignores those

title elements, so I can't imagine this having any positive SEO effect.

The worse case scenario would be that if its got a lot of keywords in the title tag, it could be seen as keyword stuffing and we know that Google can penalise sites for over-optimisation on its content.

However, like I said, I believe the bot ignores these elements.  To be safe, just make sure that each tag is relevant and not overdone or stuffed.  Keep it natural to the reader and there will be no problem.

[AlanMosley]

I remember tests being done in the past and title tag in a link does not pass relevance to the linked page, but it could possible add relevance to the linking page

to make that clear, image page A has this link

dogs

Then page B may rank for dogs even if the page has no mention of dogs because the link text has passed relevance, but I will not do the same for cats.

But if page B was about cats, then it may be possible that search engines see this link coming from a relevant page because of the title attribute. Probably not, but posible