rel=’external’ tag

March 19th, 2008 | by Ankit |
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So the question is what cud be the possible effects of the rel=”external” tag? what are its use ?

Umm … after having a long research about this tag i had seen many people think that it is like nofollow tag. It helps in prevent PageRank Pass .. this is not at all true !!

So what exactly is rel=’external’ ?

rel=’external’ is a part of xhtml code necessary to open a new window, but it requires javascript to execute this action.

function externalLinks() {
if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return;
var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (var i=0; i
 var anchor = anchors[i];
if (anchor.getAttribute(”href”) &&
anchor.getAttribute(”rel”) == “external”)
anchor.target = “_blank”;
}
}
window.onload = externalLinks;

So the conclusion is that it will still pass Page Rank to the linking site. The only thing it will do is to open a site in a new window like target=”_blank”.

Source: DigitalPoint

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5 Responses to “rel=’external’ tag”

  1. By andymurd on Mar 19, 2008

    You can also use CSS to place a small icon next to your links marking them as external (modern browsers only, so not IE6):

    a[rel="external"] { background-image: url(/gfx/external.png)}

  2. By Ankit on Mar 19, 2008

    Umm yes it will work !! Thanks for sharing !

  3. By mark on Apr 2, 2008

    Nice snippet. I use jQuery to do something like this too. All my external links are automatically _blank.

  4. By Olaf on Aug 5, 2008

    Nice tip

  5. By Dewey on Sep 15, 2008

    Thanks for the info dude, I’ve been researching for this rel=”external”. Thanks for giving light on this matter.

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