Tag: rel

XFN (XHTML Friends Network)

A big part of Web 2.0 (over the last decade) has been a move toward the semantic internet, whereas each page is representative of data and it’s relationship… we are, in essence, “training” the internet itself.

XFN markup allows you to identify your relationships to other individuals on the links of your website or blog.

HTML4:
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

HTML5: (removes the ‘profile’ attribute on <head> as such the updated convention is:
<link rel="profile" href="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11" />

Use in content:
<a href="http://www.skotfred.com/" rel="me">My other site</a>

REFERENCES:

REF:

http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/xfn

DNS Prefetching

DNS is much like a phone book for the internet. For each domain name (or subdomain like ‘www’), there is an IP address that resembles a phone number. Getting the matching number for each domain can take some time and make your site appear slow, particularly on mobile connections. Fortunately, you can pre-request this information and speed up your site in most cases.

To enable a domains DNS lookup to be performed in advance of the request, you can add a single line to the <head> section of your page.

<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//giantgeek.com" />

If you want to explicitly turn on (or off) this behavior, you can add one of the following, or their HTTP Header equivalents:

<meta http-equiv="x-dns-prefetch-control" content="on" />
<meta http-equiv="x-dns-prefetch-control" content="off" />

This is supported in all modern browsers:

  • Firefox 3.5+
  • Safari 5.0+
  • MSIE 9.0+

If should be noted that a similar method can be used to prefetch as page, but I will save that for a different article:
<link rel="prefetch" href="http://www.skotfred.com/" />

REFERENCES:

<a href=”…” rel=”nofollow”>…</a>

In an effort to reduce what is commonly referred to as “Comment SPAM”, you should consider adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to any ‘user provided’ link in your website (or Blog). Doing so will prevent many search engines (spiders) from giving the linked site additional ‘value’ or ‘relevance’ because of a multitude of links from around the web. It doesn’t remove ‘value’ from them, just makes your site not give them any additional weight.

To my knowledge; Google, Yahoo!, and MSN all support this markup.

Simply put… the intended effect of this is that any link containing rel=”nofollow” will allow both users and search engines to reach the site, but the existence of the link will not increase the ranking of the site in participating search engines.

Related info: