Uses of title= attribute

Does anyone have any real information (as opposed to guesses, which we can all make) as to the value or lack of it of using the title= attribute?

For example, does a link in the form--

<a href="http://domain.com/page.html" title="great keywords">great keywords</a>​

--provide any nontrivial benefit to either the linked page or the linking page as compared to simply--

<a href="http://domain.com/page.html">great keywords</a>​

?

And that attribute can, it seems, be added into almost any tag whatever, not just anchors and tables and images. Imagine:

<p title="secondary keywords">This paragraph discusses my secondary keywords. It says several things about them.</p>​

(After all, there's a practical limit to h5 and h6 heads--one per paragraph would seem excessive to any visitor.)

But this is such an obvious way to stuff a document while yet remaining within w3c guidelines--indeed, actually following recommendations--and even nominally (or actually) improving page quality, that one wonders how the SEs react to it.

Has anyone tried experiments?

 

Isn't all SEO guessing? I have never noticed anything that made one better than the other. I thought we were supposed to use it for visually impaired people to help with navigation.

 

Owlcroft,

I have seen this issue discussed at great length on other forums, and the consensus always was that it does you absolutley no good with Google. In fact I believe a reasonable test was conducted that supported that conclusion.

So to the degree that one can ever be sure of anything with Google, I don't think there is any SEO benefit.

 

compar,

Thanks. I suspected as much--TANSTAAFL--but it's nice to cover the bases. I normally say "If it even might help, and can't hurt, do it", but here, by seriously expanding file sizes, it can hurt, at least a little (plus it might, I suppose, set of alarms).

I suppose done in moderation, with true users (like the visually impaired) in mind, it might be A Good Thing, but I'm not gonna stay up all night tonight converting.

 

No, I wouldn't if I were you Owl. I don't think you are going to get too many visually impaired visitors looking for free tools or content creation for their websites With that said though, I think it is a relatively good idea to use them for the visually impaired etc... I tried to use them for keywords with no good return, I have since converted to a more user friendly title.