During a hangout, one SEO professional asked John Mueller about using the target attribute in a link, and how it would matter for SEO.
Their question was related to the way that links are added.
They explained that one of their technical members has added links in the form of _self, or _target, or _=blank.
How are Google bots able to crawl these things? Or, do they understand that there are links added to this particular node?
They explained that these kinds of structures are present for most of their clients and he doesn’t know 100 percent because they use different types of crawlers like Screaming Frog, and they are able to detect these links.
But they aren’t sure how Googlebot would be crawling these links.
John explained that for the target attribute, he believes they just ignore it on Google, because this makes more sense from a browser point of view.
What happens, usually, is that the target attribute, as far as John can recall, refers to how this link should be opened.
So, if you have a frame on a page, then it will open that link in a frame, for example, or in a new tab, those kinds of things.
From Google’s perspective, they don’t care, so they ignore the target attribute.
This happens at approximately the 44:00 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 6 44:02
So, my question is related to the way the links are added. So one of my technical members has added the links in the form of like underscore self or underscore target or underscore equal to blank okay, I can add some examples over here in the chat box. How are Googlebots able to like you know, crawl these things or do they understand that there are links added to this particular node that tag something over here that is mentioned?
Because these kinds of structures are present for most of my particular clients’ websites. And I don’t know because then we use the different types of crawlers, you know, like suppose Screaming Frog or some other crawler. Those crawlers are able to detect the links, but I have no idea how Googlebot can crawl the signals and [inaudible].
John 45:06
And like in the example you have href equals and then just empty quotes, is there usually a link there or…?
SEO Professional 6 45:16
No. So what they mean is like, underscore self, like target is equalled to underscore self, will itself be a link. And if you click on that, you will definitely get to the like, particular link, which actually works like if a user comes to my page, and he wants it to go up a particular page, these structures might help them. But I didn’t find a particular link in the, you know, a href is equal to something.
So I don’t know how these searches are working, but they are working. And the other crawler, like, as I mentioned, this, the Screaming Frog, they are able to detect this kind of stuff. These are the correct links, which are added over here, but there is no link over here. So I really wanted to know the overall pattern of the bots. Will they also be able to detect, because this info is, again, I think given the way the bots crawl and then…
John 46:11
Yeah, so the target attribute there, I think we just ignore, because it makes more sense from a browser point of view, what what happens. Usually, the target attribute, as far as I recall, refers to how that link should be opened. So if you have a frame on a page, then it will open that link in a frame, for example, or in a new tab, those kinds of things. And from our point of view, we don’t care.
So we ignore the target attribute. So that target equals and then underscore self. It’s basically we ignore that. The href attribute in the link is essentially what we focus on. If there is no href kind of value given there, then essentially, that link goes to the same page. And we ignore that.
So you’re, it’s from from our point of view, like if if we were to see something like like you posted in chat, where it’s like a target equals self, and then href equals nothing, we would think that this is something that we can drop, because there’s no kind of source and destination for that individual link, because it it just points to itself. Again, if you had a URL after the href equals, then we would treat that as a normal link to that page.
