As with most things in SEO, some will say “this works” and some will tell you “this will give you a penalty.” Not surprisingly, it’s the same with link title attributes. We test if Google can read this attribute and if it can index a page using just this.
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Does Google Read Link Title Attributes?
This is one of those things that are just like everything – you do a quick search: link title attributes are an excellent hack – people don’t think about it, it will boost your pages, others will say no and it is a negative factor and pages drop, others say it is not a factor and Google does not read them. Link title attributes are very similar to image title attributes – not the image alt but the title. If you hover over an image, you would see a little pop-up box that is the image title, you can say the same thing for links.
You can also do this for links inside pages. Hilariously, in that wp article, it talks about some SEO experts believe that title attributes are not useful while some claim they are useful for SEO and provide more context – so even in the article that explains how to do that they throw in that people are split on this. That is why we are here.
That is the whole reason for SIA. There is no reason to be split. This is an easily testable thing which we could test and check out. That is what we did.
I ran this test three times. This is in WordPress, in the text editor. We created the link and we put the title which was a fake keyword and an anchor text. This fake keyword did not exist on the page. The idea is, in the first test, we want to see if Google is even reading these things and if they are in the game at all.
If Google is reading this as an element, if this is a factor that Google is considering, this page should index by putting that keyword in that spot. Test one, it did not index. We ran it again with the same set up and it was still not indexed, the same with test three.
This is pretty close to a double mythbuster where people say that it is good and that it is bad. Actually, it is looking like it is not a factor because the page should index if it is something that Google is reading.
This doesn’t do it 100% because it is possible that there are some factors that just simply aren’t part of indexing. I find that difficult to believe but it is possible so we are running this test again right now where we have it in a test environment to see if our number three page will move up, down, or not at all. But I am anticipating based on this that it is not going to move but we will test it to be double sure
The bigger thing here is, it is something that is not worth your time. At best, it would be an infinitesimal factor but since we are not seeing any movement, this leads me to believe that it is not a factor, possibly a negative factor, if Google is really reading it and caring. So, it is not something that I would spend my time doing when we think about how we only have so much time and budget, this isn’t where I would be looking to get those slight edges.