target SEO question

[coder]

So I was wondering what other people thought of the idea of opening pages in new windows? Does this pass less link juice to the new page, since you still have your original site open.

I would imagine that a link to a new site that opens in the same window is a higher vote of confidence for that site. If there is any difference between the 2 versions, I would think the difference would be pretty small.

Thoughts?

[williamc]

Actually some time back there were tests done that actually showed a target="" appeared to influence link power to the positive. No idea how valid that may be now, this was some time back. But rest assured, whatever google sees webmasters doing the most of, they will adjust the knobs the other way.

[full house]

I think not, for me there is no difference between the two...I always open a site to new tab.

[mjtaylor]

A new tab and a new window might be different?

Interesting, William. I wouldn't have thought it had any effect on passing PageRank at all.

[williamc]

Not pagerank MJ, anchor boost apparently is what the discussion was about on the subject as I recall. Trying to find that thread. So many places I post makes it hard to remember where.

[SEOCipher]

That's an interesting question that I've often wondered about. I've always assumed that PR and relevance flow through a link the same regardless, but I suppose it would be relatively easy to test. You could link to two different pages with made up anchor text that exists nowhere in Google's index. One link would have a target="" so it pops in a new window while the other would not. Query Google with that anchor text and see which of the two pages ranks best. Repeat the test several times with different pages/anchor text. If the page with the inbound link without the target always ranks best, then I think you could say that a link with a target attribute has some sort of PR/relevance dilution factor. My guess would be that the results won't be consistent, meaning that it probably has minimal influence or none at all.

[microtekblue]

So I was wondering what other people thought of the idea of opening pages in new windows? Does this pass less link juice to the new page, since you still have your original site open.

Thoughts?

New windows are usually meant for external links. Linking out to sites that you don't want to completely lose traffic to is when you would probably use the target _blank attribute.

If you don't want to pass PR you can simply use rel no follow.

I don't think think in terms of seo it matters if you open links internally or externally.

[kcire]

SEO-wise I do not think it matters if a page opens in the same or a new window...It is a page...with text and/or images...with links..and links to it.

Or do you think a searchengine experiences the page that opens in a new window as if it does not belong to the website that opened it? Is that what you mean?

I am a validating-nut and in the past 'targets' within links wouldn't be validated by the W3C: The W3C Markup Validation Service (http://validator.w3.org/)

At the moment this doesn't seem to matter anymore....so whenever I have to make a link to an external website, I will ad a 'target=_blank'...but only if it is a 'external website'.

Also consider this: old or slow PC's sometimes cannot handle 'yet another window'...and I had my share of slow PC's. A new window could crash the PC..or at least the browser at hand when working on a (very) old/slow PC.

So...when I visit a website and a link on this website opens a new window without warning me before...I get irritated.

At least always make clear a link is opening a new window!

And of course, like you stated yourself, a page opening in the same window always get's a higher vote of confidence, at least by me. And somehow I think most people think about it this way.

[byronc]

My money as a programmer is that google wont care what window you are opening the same site in?

[morestar]

That's an interesting question that I've often wondered about. I've always assumed that PR and relevance flow through a link the same regardless, but I suppose it would be relatively easy to test. You could link to two different pages with made up anchor text that exists nowhere in Google's index. One link would have a target="" so it pops in a new window while the other would not. Query Google with that anchor text and see which of the two pages ranks best. Repeat the test several times with different pages/anchor text. If the page with the inbound link without the target always ranks best, then I think you could say that a link with a target attribute has some sort of PR/relevance dilution factor. My guess would be that the results won't be consistent, meaning that it probably has minimal influence or none at all.

Nice SEOCipher...

[deepsand]

Theoretically, so long as the target is not opened via script, in which case Google will most likely not have indexed the OBL, an href is an href; i.e., it should make no difference, given that PR is a probability value which is unaffected by the number and type of views that are concurrently open.

[Pablo Palatnik]

i really dont think it makes any difference as i dont think the target is an element that google uses to pass on pagerank. as it stands, thats why they implemented the follow or nofollow. the other theory floating around which ive been looking more into is the difference between a stand-alone link and link with surrounding text.

[Milo]

They both do the same job really ie. open a new page of information. I can't see any valid reason as to why it would make any difference whether that page opens up in a new window or not, it more a usability issue. I think the only negative impact would be whether the visitor found it usefull or not and would make no difference to PR at all.

[SemAdvance]

PageRank computation is Link from Page A to Page B.

Pages are stored on servers. Whether they open in a window or not.

Search spiders crawl servers,..... they do not crawl top, new, blank.

Since we know the SEs can index pages that open in new or blank targets, then it is safe to venture a guess the target has no bearing on PageRank distribution. Those indexed pages, are stored on servers as noted above.

Further, coding is separated from content when determining rankings and related algorithmic scoring.

Hope this helps...

[BluePlanet]

I have been building and hosting websites since 1996 and I don't think it makes any difference at all.

Opening pages from the same site in a new window would though be a big irritation for most users, including me.

I only do it under one condition. I have over 65 websites under several corporate entities. To help manage things each corporation has a main site that is basicly a directory to all the other sites. It also has things like policy statements, comment page, etc. that it doesn't make sense to duplicate on every site. The directory type sites open a new site in a new window, so someone can find it easy to go back to the main site and then visit one of the other sites listed there.

Also, each corporate entity has its sites on a different web host so the links to the various sites carry a bit more ranking power, and if one host goes down, it doesn't disrupt all of my business operations.

[SunnyG]

I don't think theres any difference in terms of SEO. But yeah I use this technique (opening pages in new windows) for my friends/partners websites. Actually I don't want to loose my traffic when they enter in my website.