Not only UGC and Sponsored: guide to link attributes

Links are an important part of SEO and the Web in general, we say this often: without hyperlinks, Google and other search engines may not discover sites’ pages or may not understand how important they are. For our part, we have a number of tools to communicate precisely the latter to crawlers: that is, we can label links (particularly outbound links) with a number of attributes that serve to specify their nature and improve evaluation. So let’s talk about the famous link rels, the attributes we can implement to site pages, which can also have an impact on SEO.

What the rel value of a link means, the link attribute

In the HTML language, the rel attribute defines the relationship between the current document and the linked resource; it is placed inside the <a> tag, which as we know is used to specify a link, and can be customized with different styles or attributes, including precisely the rel that today we delve into.

The term rel stands for relationship, and adding this tag to a link is equivalent to indicating to Googlebot and crawlers that there is some sort of connection between our site and the resource to which we are linking the page. The value of the attribute serves precisely to specify the nature of this relationship.

At a general level, the presence of a rel tag for links thus determines the type of relationship between the page from which the link starts and the target resource. Supported by all the most widely used browsers for Internet browsing, from a technical point of view this attribute must express tokens that are semantically valid for both machines and humans – its value is an unordered set of unique keywords, separated by spaces, non-case sensitive (so there is no distinction between upper and lower case) and without relevance of the order of the terms (in the case of multiple use, the chosen sequence is not important).

How to add attributes to links

Still continuing with the technical specifications, we can manually add the rel attribute by working directly on the HTML code of the page (or delegating a plugin to handle the link), hierarchically inserting the reference immediately after the URL of the linked resource, with a space at the end of the quotation marks enclosing the address.

Visually, therefore, a tagged link appears as follows:

<a href=”https://example.com/seo” rel=”nofollow”>SEO</a>.

This is the HTML representation of an action that text editors make really simple: usually, in fact, to add a link on a blog or site (but also on a Word document) we simply highlight the text we wish to make clickable (the anchor text), click a button, and paste the link. Adding the tag allows us to add more meaning and context for crawlers.

Basically, in fact, a link has no default rel value: therefore, if we omit the tag or if we write an unsupporte