Read More and Unique Strings for Sub-Teaser Links

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mgifford's picture

We've been discussing the need for unique strings of text for unique links in the new WCAG 2.0 standards. But Cliff brought up that there are some SEO issues involved in this as well. So how do we get more meaningful links coming from our list/view pages so that instead of having 100 links pointing to your page say "Read more" and we have more using a related string, like "Accessible Themes for Drupal".

As it's been said many times before, there are good SEO reasons to improve a sites accessibility. Google is after all the biggest, richest & most powerful visually impaired internet user.

Would love to have some feedback here (or on the original post about unique strings).

Comments

link text

Z2222's picture

From the tests that I've read about, Google only reads the link text of a link the first time it appears on the page so I'm not sure if it's a critical SEO issue.

(The post title link appears before the "read more" link.)

It might be a good idea to fix for usability issues though.

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First Link Only

mgifford's picture

Thanks. That's good to know about the first link (not all links).

From a SEO point of view, do you know if there would be any implications of including the full title within the link (but hiding it), like the following example:

      <div class="links"><a href="/comment/reply/17627/61407">reply<span class="hidden"> to comment Without editing themes? within post Need for Unique Strings for Different Links</span></a></div>

Where the hidden class is defined by:

.hidden
{
position:absolute;
left:0px;
top:-500px;
width:1px;
height:1px;
overflow:hidden;
}

It would help with screen readers, but we're not sure if this type of approach would affect SEO.

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I wouldn't want to hide a

Z2222's picture

I wouldn't want to hide a lot of links with CSS. My way of thinking about SEO is to make the site as simple as possible for crawlers, and don't do anything that could accidentally be mistaken as spammy. (Bots are easy to confuse.)

Will screen readers pick up the title attribute? E.g., <a href="http://example.com/" title="The meaning of life">read more</a>

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Well Google Can't Really Argue With W3C

mgifford's picture

Using the title attribute is so WCAG 1.0. WCAG 2.0 requires -- "2.4.4 - The purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone, or from the link text together with its programmatically determined link context, except where the purpose of the link would be ambiguous to users in general." For Level AAA (2.4.9) the link must make sense by itself.

So from here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20081211/C7

Using WCAG's CSS:

a span { height: 1px; width: 1px; position: absolute; overflow: hidden; top: -10px; } 

And Example HTML:

<div class="links"><a href="/comment/reply/17627/61407">reply<span> to comment Without editing themes? within post Need for Unique Strings for Different Links</span></a></div>

This would be perfect. Google would know this technique and likely have contributed to it.

They describe the title attribute use for WCAG 2.0 here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20081211/H33

I can't see that it makes sense to use it.

This make sense to SEO folks?

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From an SEO perspective I

Z2222's picture

From an SEO perspective I would definitely never do this:

span { height: 1px; width: 1px; position: absolute; overflow: hidden; top: -10px; }

I would worry about accidentally tripping black hat SEO detectors. (1x1 px hidden text)

IMHO, it's very bad planning by the W3C. Why don't they just make a new attribute for it (or use title element) and get the assistive technology programmers to recognize it? That would be easier than talking web designers into making 1x1 px text for every link.

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The theory of the first-link

Augusto Ellacuriaga's picture

The theory of the first-link only accounts has not provided definite results due to issues with variables in the controlled environment where the tests were conducted. In fact, the only official response we have so far in regards to this issue was made by Matt Cutts (Google Head of Spam), who stated that if 2 links have similar anchor text, then it's most likely that they will discount the second link http://thelinkspiel.blogspot.com/2008/07/calling-matt-cutts-to-bat-phone.... Unfortunately this does not help that much either.

As you might know, conducting SEO tests in controlled environment is a challenging task. Therefore, it's always encouraged to consider the results with grains of salt until more tests are conducted, they are proven valid or confirmed by the Search Engines.

If Matt's comment is 100% applicable, then the "logo" link, which normally comes in first place will neutralize all others in the bolierplate and content. There are ways to change the logo link programatically. However, from the usability standpoint we also have to consider other benefits that are more relevant that SEO.

International SEO

Why Not the Title Attribute?

mgifford's picture

Believe that the title attribute was the recommendation from WCAG 1.0 but that it wasn't used consistently enough to be useful.

Because most web sites didn't use it most screen readers either didn't have options to use it or didn't have them enabled by default.

I'm asking around though and was glad to see that you are too. Finding discussions about this within the Joomla community too.

Also some interesting discussions about variations on "Read me" links in general.

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link text

Z2222's picture

Believe that the title attribute was the recommendation from WCAG 1.0 but that it wasn't used consistently enough to be useful.

If people didn't use "title" consistently, what makes the W3C think that people are going to start use a much more complicated and hackish 1x1 px hidden text solution? :)

Is there any way to contact them and give them some feedback before it becomes a standard? I think a lot of people will protest that idea.

Do you have a link to the Jooma conversations?

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mgifford's picture

The 1x1 px isn't really the focus. That was just an example. They want all of the links to contain the "text that gives a description of the information at that URI". Trick is that for many sites this is a bit wordy and unmanageable. See the W3C's success criterion for in context links. The guidelines were finalized (after many years) back in December 2008.

I have been looking but haven't seen any solutions that address this conflict between what Google suggests & what the WC3 suggests as far as the Read More text goes.

As far as Joomla, their help documentation has a WCAG checklist that is useful.

Probably more stuff too, but this was a good start.

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I read the post you cited

Augusto Ellacuriaga's picture

I read the post you cited and am trying to understand the reasons for this one. First off, in a usability study conducted by Copyblogger, the "Click to continue" link returned better results than anything else, including of course "read more." That's what I've been using in conjunction with the read_more plugin.

I''m not extremely concern about what text should go in that link, from the SEO standpoint, since the best way is to nofollow it so that only the title of the node is picked up. Granted, the link to the image will also be picked up, but that uses the alt attribute as an anchor text which can use the title of the node. Ultimately you can remove the "read more" for better sculping.

For usability purposes, then yes you can put whatever your/their results provide and accommodate that according to your audience. For SEO, the idea will be to include your keywords or node title as the anchor text. But, how do you think people will react to seeing the title twice? You can always add "more about title of the node goes here." Additionally, having the node title repeated over and over through the copy of the main page may also disbalance the core keywords you are targeting by creating unneeded text.

I'm not sure though if Search Engines are considering "Read More" links part of the boilerplate. If they are, then there is a possibility that they are even discounting that text. Otherwise, it will have an impact in the rest of the copy, which I haven't really seen that problem with high quality sites.

I just checked Google

Z2222's picture

I just checked Google Webmaster Tools under "What Googlebot sees" for a WordPress blog and the #33 and #34 keywords in the content are "read" and "more".

I don't know if that means anything though.

Check this out:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22read+more%22+inurl%3Anode&num=100

Notice that the results are nodes and don't always have "read more" on the page -- only in the link pointing to the pages.

Here's the #1 result as an example:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40076

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I just logged in WMT to

Augusto Ellacuriaga's picture

I just logged in WMT to check a couple of WP blogs, one in English and the other one in Spanish. They don't have the "read more" links in the front page. /blog uses do follow in both cases with "Continue reading" and "Continúe leyendo" respectively. In neither case the anchor text for both links were found under "What Google sees", nor the site is ranking for those keyphrases. However, the links were counted in both cases (as seen under "Pages with internal links").

For a different site using nofollow for the "read more" link, neither the anchor nor the links were found. No external links pointing to those pages with the anchor "read more".

The one thing to consider then is the context ratio, keyword co-ocurrence and semantic connectivity. In the cases mentioned above the content ratio for the keyphrases was not relevant.

According to Yahoo, theonion.com page you mentioned above has 1,070 links pointing to that specific page as of today. I haven't really digged into the anchors use in all those links, but saw the top links were not "read more". It's possible that there might be some "read more" links, which could explain the reasons why the site is #1 for that query. Also, in the editorial content you will see a 1 occurrence for the term "read" and 3 for "more." Since that site has high trust and other quality factors, it's very likely that these occurrences could have triggered the results.

Read More Phrase in My Results

mgifford's picture

I just checked what Googlebot sees for OpenConcept's site and was prompted to write it up. Main concern I had though was to toss up an image of the results like this for a Drupal site.

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nofollow

Z2222's picture

I read your writeup -- By "nofollow" did you mean nofolllowing the hidden text? I don't think it would help to nofollow the positioned hidden text.

From Wikipedia, it looks like the W3C already made this a standard last month.

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nofollow details

mgifford's picture

I don't really know enough about SEO to give judgment on this, but essentially it's adding this to the example that I did previously (although actually I'm slightly confusing things by tossing in a title tag too):

<div class="links"><a href="/comment/reply/17627/61407" rel="nofollow" title="More about post 'Without editing themes? within post Need for Unique Strings for Different Links'">reply<span class="hidden"> to comment Without editing themes? within post Need for Unique Strings for Different Links</span></a></div>

These guys seem to know a log more though:
http://www.seo-theory.com/2008/06/11/rand-fishkin-still-doesnt-understan...
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000630.shtml

I'm sure others on this list can give a better reference.

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<div class="links"><a

Z2222's picture

<div class="links"><a href="/comment/reply/17627/61407" rel="nofollow" title="More about post 'Without editing themes? within post Need for Unique Strings for Different Links'">reply<span class="hidden"> to comment Without editing themes? within post Need for Unique Strings for Different Links</span></a></div>

That example will prevent search engines from following the link and discovering the linked-to page.

I still wouldn't use positioned, hidden text even with nofollow. Google has ways that it tries to detect spam, and I wouldn't want to accidentally trigger any of those filters or penalties.

Google says not to hide text with CSS or set the font-size to zero:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353&topi...

AFAIK, only Google has said it's okay to nofollow internal links. See other serious issues with it here:
http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow

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Inconsistencies with Google Policies

mgifford's picture

I've asked for a response here:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/search?hl=en&q=wcag

Hopefully we'll get something solid one of these days from them. Nice thread on this issue going on here too:
http://sphinn.com/story/96222

There are only a few search engines out there that really matter. It's taken 8 years to get WCAG 2.0 finalized, don't think they are going to re-open it for this. Google had a representative at the table for WCAG, and so must have had internal discussions about how to deal with their standards.

Think we just need Google to say that they will respect WCAG standards (that they helped to implement). Also would be great to have someone run a quick test through Google Analytics Site Optimizer to check.
https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/exptlist

Might even get better results!

Mike

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