The LINK tag has influence on search engines crawling, indexing and also rankings, if the HREF attribute is present within it. Also, the LINK tag can contain another important attribute, the REL attribute. This attribute, along with HREF, can provide more information to search engine bots about the relationship between the interlinked URLs.
Keep in mind that the REL attribute can be applied to an A tag too. This means that you can specify relationships between the interlinked documents not only in the head section of your web pages, but anywhere inside your documents.
The opposite of the REL attribute is the REV attribute and you can find a good explanation of both in here. For more values of the REL attribute here's a comprehensive list. Keep in mind that the list of supported values for REL attribute is different for HTML 4 and HTML 5.
Why do you need to pay attention this attribute?
First, some search engines will use the LINK tag to discover other documents. To identify new documents they will try to crawl the URL provided in the HREF value of this tag. The relationship between the interlinked documents is specified in the REL attribute and the type of relationship can have very important consequences on how search engines crawl your website (think about the canonical value of the REL attribute or nofollow).
Second, some browsers may display navigational icons when they identify an RSS feed associated with the current document, which is great for usability and improving behavioral metrics such as page views or time on site.
Third, you can use this attribute to provide search engine additional information about the interlinked documents. For example you can specify the author of the linked document, which can help bots identify the original source of a content, even if it gets copied and republished over and over again. Google is now supporting the author value of the REL attribute and use it to determine the relevancy of one's page to a user's query.
Traian has almost a decade experience in online marketing and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, an SEO Services that provides Internet Marketing Services to SMB clients around the world. For more information visit: www.pitstopmedia.com
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