What is the function of the html "rel" attribute?

html anchor rel
secondubly picture secondubly · Aug 22, 2013 · Viewed 12.2k times · Source

I understand that rel got something to do with relationships between things (documents? elements?) but I don't really get anything past that. What exactly does it do when used in the achor tag ? Also, are there specific values for x in rel="x"?

Answer

Alfie picture Alfie · Aug 22, 2013

Typically they are used to provide information to search engines about the structure of your website. For instance, you can give links a next or prev rel attribute for paginating links (links which show the next/last set of search results), or you could supply a canonical value to tell search engines which is the default link for the page it is looking at (sometimes pages are accessible via a number of different links, and this avoids indexing of duplicate content which could hurt your SEO).

Here are couple of links from Google regarding best usage:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394

Related questions

How to open link in new tab on html?

I'm working on an HTML project, and I can't find out how to open a link in a new tab without javascript. I already know that <a href="http://www.WEBSITE_NAME.com"></a> opens the …

Read More
How can I create a link to a local file on a locally-run web page?

I'd like to have an html file that organizes certain files scattered throughout my hard drive. For example, I have two files that I would link to: C:\Programs\sort.mw C:\Videos\lecture.mp4 The problem is that I'd …

Read More
Make a div into a link

I have a <div> block with some fancy visual content that I don't want to change. I want to make it a clickable link. I'm looking for something like <a href="…"><div> … </div&…

Read More