[uf-discuss] Re: Precise Expansion Patterns

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 12/15/07 4:39 PM, "Martin McEvoy" <martin at weborganics.co.uk> wrote:

> OK Paul, lets try and put that in the real world, My client has a music
> store with around 500 pages of content and around 10 to 20 items of
> hAudio on each page, My client want's their pages to validate and be
> accessible.. no problem i say, semantic markup... and SEO,  semantic
> markup... we can sprinkle some hAudio magic in there I say .. great my
> client says because they trust me im good at my job, I do the job, my
> boss looks at my work and says "what are all these empty anchors
> about"... pause right there... any SEO worth his salt will know anchor
> text links that go nowhere, will A, reduce the quality of out going
> links from your site so reducing PR (Page Rank) and B, more than likley
> get you banned from google because it will think you are trying to spam
> it.... you know what my boss will say....you are sacked.
> 
> so no thank you Paul although your idea is workable, its still a hack,
> and in the real world never likely to be used.

Martin, thanks for this reality-check.  You've provided some good reasons
for why empty hyperlinks are an anti-pattern, and given that that's two this
week, and that we have a few existing anti-patterns documented on the wiki,
I've drafted this wiki page accordingly.

http://microformats.org/wiki/anti-patterns

In particular I've documented part of what you noted above in this section:

http://microformats.org/wiki/anti-patterns#empty_hyperlinks

I encourage you to expand upon it with any additional details / references.

Thanks,

Tantek