cabennett85/gittest — Issue #999: HREF tags in category browsing are not SEO optimized
Author: cabennett85
Created: 2012-03-02 00:30:22+00:00
State: open

The individual NPOs listed in the category browsing pages are one massive HREF block, including images, text, tons of HTML, lots of whitespace, category information, and description, all in ONE mega anchor tag.

Source HTML from one entry on a category browsing page (lots of whitespace manually removed):

Youth UpRising	Other	In just a few years since it’s opening in 2005, Youth Uprising (YU) has gone from a barebones operation to a bustling, 25,000-square-foot, high-tech youth leadership development …

Controversial, but Google only looks at approximately the first 8 words in a pure anchor tag (http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/anchor-text-length/), nevertheless we should only be linking the image and the name of the NPO in an anchor tag, in separate anchors. All this whitespace and html is garbage, and a misuse of the HREF tag, to the bot, and possibly lowers the quality score of the page and limits the link juice-passing.

For usability, it's brilliant to have the entire block level element clickable, but we can use JS onclick handler for the containing LI element for that purpose, which degrades gracefully in that the image and the name of the NPO would still be clickable.