This is to address "SEO" and anchors (<a>) in documents. Fortunately, good SEO is more complex then boiling down well-ranking in SERPs into how the anchors are set in a document.
Regarding: http://microformats.org/wiki/anti-patterns#empty_hyperlinks point A) if there is no href attribute and value set then the current document is not pointing to any resource, therefore there is no impact on PR as there is no weight to distribute between documents. point B) Google or any other search engine will not simply ban a Web site from the left-field if there are no obvious indicators ("bad intentions") to be delisted from SERPs. Needless to say, getting banned is not a quick automated action and "spamming" goes much further then that. Moreover this is like suggesting using URL fragments (internal link anchors) in href is bad for SEO. In addition to all this, I do not think that microformats should be concerned with the SEO practices as there are many guidelines out there and which method works well for one site today on a particular engine may not necessarily work tomorrow. Therefore, I strongly think that we move away from these sort of practices. I've written about good SEO practices (read: good Web development practices) if anyone would like to give it a read: http://www.csarven.ca/internal-seo-guidelines By mentioning all this I am not suggesting the usage of empty anchors (no href attribute/value). -Sarven _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
