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...

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

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?

What if the user gave his original post a rel="canonical" tag?

Hi Cyrus,

Here's some more information. Hopefully it will help. All of our product pages are generated using a program. Users enter data into specific fields and gets saved.

Once the publish button is pushed of the program, the data goes to our developers. This isn't live on the web yet as it is just data. The information is dumped into a folder and our developers generate SEO urls and start populating templates with data.

This is what gets published live and indexed.

If I wanted to change the SEO URL. I simply need to specify which fields to generate the new URL from and get the existing URL to redirect to the new one. I can secure a single jump this way and crawlers will never jump from one link to another.

Google just sees this SEO URL and template page.

The problem is that, for efficiency purposes, the website's internal search doesn't use the SEO url, it instead generates a url based on the folder that gets data dumped in. Once a user clicks on this URL, they get redirected to the SEO page. Developers did this for "efficiency reasons"

This is where meta refresh is kicking in. Anyone who clicks on a product from a search gets redirects to the SEO one. SEOMoz is reporting a high meta refresh issue, but my developers are saying it's no problem as the search pages never get indexed.

In my opinion, even though the page isn't getting indexed, the spider is still following and noticing the meta refresh.

After pursuing, they said they can turn off from caching redirects. I'm not well versed in the implications of turning off the caching of redirects. Thus my curious question

Okay some findings.

Been reading this blog entry by cpcstrategy.com and they have a great example

Take the keyphrase "Nike Men's Air Rival golf shoes overstock", now search on Google, Bing and Yahoo

• Google
• Bing
• Yahoo

As you can see, Yahoo displays a product image. It seems each search engine has it's own way of displaying content.

Gentlemen, my suggestion is to tag it with the product image and corresponding URL. If Google so wishes to change it's algorithm to display the image more prominently, then it would kick in and work.

I wouldn't omit it or use recipe's as a product page tag. If Google goes more aggressive with schema, you'll just have another work on your plate to figure out which pages had the recipe image.

Darin, how does your link look in Yahoo or Bing. Do they display the image?

I think you guys have stumbled onto something.  Here's a link someone advertised as showing product images in search, but reviewing the link again gives nothing.

Did google remove the functionality for products and kept it for authors, recipes? Maybe to not dilute Google Merchant Center?

I can't find a working example to analyse in 'Structured Data Testing Tool'

Exactly.

You can view the schema codes here, here's the product page one with examples. You can see image highlighted

http://schema.org/Product

Hope that helps.

There is no doubt in my mind, search engines will get smarter and punish those who abuse the system.

It's been the norm since the beginning, from keyword stuffing to exact match-domains. Eventually search engines will catch up and punish. When this happens, you'll be in the deep hole trying to recover rather than strengthen.

My advice would be to go down the correct route for tagging product pages. I don't think an author tag is right for a product page, but introduce breadcrumbs, prices, ratings and product images. Last thing you want are users clicking on your page and leaving.

If I wanted to buy a laptop and saw the face of an author who wrote that page, that's a WTF moment for me. Instead, show me a screenshot of a laptop, the price range, number of reviews and the breadcrumb structure...yeah, I'm clicking that.

What i'm trying to say is that, rather than focusing on the competitor and mimicking, focus on your customer and what best would turn them from newbie to a returnee.

I would like to know what fellow SEO people think, should you cache a redirect?

Problems I see with caching redirects are meta refreshes and there might be a slow down in page load, but is it a big issue? Should we cache redirects?

Do pages get indexed more if you cache redirects? Our ecommerce product pages are all dynamic, and currently we cache redirects but i'm seeing a lot of meta refresh issues.

Another area that cropped up is that, the redirect doesn't pass on query parameters. Our system dumps URLs and they are redirected to SEO ones, but the redirect doesn't pass on parameters like Google Analytic tracking tags.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks

I'm reviewing my campaign, and spotted the overly-dynamic URL box showing a few links.

Reviewing it, they are my Google Tagged URLs (utm_source, utm_medium_utm_campaign etc)

I've turned  some internal links to Google Tagged URLs but should these cause concern?

Thank you, didn't know ( and ) are only valid for Google Search Appliance

We're going to use javascript/styling to hide the cookie message as our code is in the html of the page.

Hello!

So i've been looking at the cached text  version of our website. (Google Eyes is a great add on for this)

One thing I've noticed is that, Google caches our EU Cookie Law message. The message appears on the top of the page and Google is caching this.

The message is enclosed within  and but it still is being cached.

I'm going to ask the development mean to move the message at the bottom of the page and fix the position, but reviewing other websites with cookie messages, Google isn't caching them in their text only versions.

Any tips or advice?

Thanks AntkitMaheshwari and Danrawk,

I've just downloaded a chrome extention to view text versions of the cached file. Our built in template is spewing multiple h1s but that's something we need to look at separately. We also have a lot of menu links which might be pushing the crawling to review the text at a later stage..But still, it skipped the H1 and first paragraph.

I'll look into this a bit more.

Danrawk, on page grader gives an A and there is no weird formatting. Maybe it's a conflict issue. It's counting the first H1 and skipping the second.

Hmm...

Here's something I noticed. We have a rank A page and it's ranking 10 on Google search results.

When I hover my mouse over our search result, Google gives us a preview, but Google also highlights in red where the search keyword is present on the page.

Reviewing our page, even though we have it as the h1 header and intro paragraph, Google is highlighting it half way down the page.  Any ideas why?

I review rank 1 - 5 and Google highlights the keyword on the intro paragraph and h1 header

Have you guys experienced anything like this? It makes me think..Google could be crawling my site and thinking I haven't got it in the h1 or intro paragraph etc..

Thoughts?

I thought that too but what if you have numerous images promoting a product? Can't have:

• product name (an a unique identifier) for image 1
• product name (an a unique identifier) for image 2
• product name (an a unique identifier) for image 3

Wouldn't it look spammy to have numerous images on a product page with the same keyword as the title?

In my view, images on a product page should enhance the product, they should demonstrate the product in action to further incentivise the customer to go "aha..this is a great product."

For example a product like a shovel would  have images showing the shovel in usage.

This is why I thought the description would work as it describes the image, is unique and features the product name. But yeah, it's the length that concerns me.

ello ello!

We're running an ecommerce site with thousands of products. None of the product pages have an IMG ALT.

We're been thinking about an IMG ALT rule to apply to all product page images. Every image currently has a detailed caption so the thought was, why don't we use the description as the IMG ALT? It's perfect as it explains the image.

Now the thing is, the length of the description, some of them come to 150 - 200 characters with spaces. Do you think this is too much?

Also, would having a caption and the IMG ALT be the same cause issues?

Have you guys employed any rules for IMG ALT in a bulk way?

Hey guys,

Looking at schema, especially the aggregate rating, It's easy for anything to just put up a rating and slap on the code to their page.

But wouldn't this open up abuse of schema? Are there any mechanisms search engines have put in place to de-rank such practices? I just see schema trusting users to do the morally right thing rather than a mechanism to capture/punish bad practices

Thoughts?

What would you recommend as best practice? Our ecommerce site has a lot of PDFs supporting the product page. Currently they are kept in a sub domain and so are all images.

Would it be better to keep them all in a subfolder? I've read about blogs being hosted on a subfolder to be better than subdomain but what about pdfs and images?

thoughts?