Can anyone help me understand this

[seoguy81]

I was checking through my site's code today and came upon this interesting piece of code in the header (wordpress)

<link rel='index' title='mysite title' href='mydomain' />

What does this do? And if it has anything to tell Google about sitelinks, how can I incorporate the same thing for other sections in my menu?

 

[DebtFreeMe]

What that is is for the search engines: first it tells them to index the link: rel='index', next it tells them the title of your site: title='mysite title', which will come out of the wordpress settings that you set, and then it will link that title to your url: href='mydomain'...

Nothing cosmic... Not sure what you mean by incorporating in into other sections? This is standard with most wordpress setups as far as I'm aware...

 

[W9go]

Refers to a document providing an index for the current document.
<link rel="index" href=........

 

[madoctopus]

What that is is for the search engines: first it tells them to index the link: rel='index', next it tells them the title of your site: title='mysite title', which will come out of the wordpress settings that you set, and then it will link that title to your url: href='mydomain'...

Nothing cosmic... Not sure what you mean by incorporating in into other sections? This is standard with most wordpress setups as far as I'm aware...

incorrect. has nothing to do with engines specifically. it is just metadata. rel="index" means the link is for the index of the site not that it should be indexed. meta robots handles engine directives like index,follow.

@op: have u even bothered to google mate? first result for <link rel="index" is http://www.seoconsultants.com/meta-tags/link-relationship and third is the actual w3 specs - http://www.w3.org/TR/html40/struct/links.html

...lazy ass

 

[seoguy81]

Apologies.. but what I wanted to know is does this have any impact on Google sitelinks. Google did index a few sitelinks for me, but more than 50% are posts rather than top level menu. Discovering the above I kind of assumed, that perhaps it might be something from an SEO/Google's point of view to maybe tell the spider that "index" is something important..

Guess i'm wrong??

 

[seoguy81]

incorrect. has nothing to do with engines specifically. it is just metadata. rel="index" means the link is for the index of the site not that it should be indexed. meta robots handles engine directives like index,follow.

@op: have u even bothered to google mate? first result for <link rel="index" is http://www.seoconsultants.com/meta-tags/link-relationship and third is the actual w3 specs - http://www.w3.org/TR/html40/struct/links.html

...lazy ass

Not lazy man.. one of those days when everything under the sky goes wrong. If you haven't experienced that.. lucky you! Thnks for the explanation.

 

[madoctopus]

Apologies.. but what I wanted to know is does this have any impact on Google sitelinks. Google did index a few sitelinks for me, but more than 50% are posts rather than top level menu. Discovering the above I kind of assumed, that perhaps it might be something from an SEO/Google's point of view to maybe tell the spider that "index" is something important..

Guess i'm wrong??

No. has nothing to do with sitelinks.

 

[DebtFreeMe]

incorrect. has nothing to do with engines specifically. it is just metadata. rel="index" means the link is for the index of the site not that it should be indexed. meta robots handles engine directives like index,follow.

If this is true then why would you use the rel=noindex as in do not index this site in the search engine i.e Google results?

 

[madoctopus]

If this is true then why would you use the rel=noindex as in do not index this site in the search engine i.e Google results?

<a rel="noindex" ...> is applied at link level. <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> on document level. <link rel="index" is something entirely different and is not a directive to tell the SE to index the page or not. There is no <link rel="noindex" as it would make no sense. Possible values are "index", "start", "prev", "next" for documents, "stylesheet" for stylesheets, etc. It is a remantic thing. "rel" stands for "relation". On a link (A tag) you can have rel="friend" if you link to a friend's site. Or rel="spouse" if she's your wife. It is semantic. Read the specs.

 

[DebtFreeMe]

Interesting, thanks for that. I miss understood how it was being applied...