Is there an optimal / maximum length for Anchor Titles? [closed]

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I'm currently getting a bit more into SEO beside working the normal agency development I do all day. My question now is, since I didn't find a suiting answer on several German and International SEO Blogs, including Matt Cutts Blog and Videos on YouTube, is there a maximum length or optimal length for <a>'s titles?

For example:

<a href="http://www.yourlink.com">Click here</a>

It's a bad example because first you're not using any title, and second you're using a generic "Click here" as link text.

Another one:

<a href="http://www.yourlink.com" title="TopicXYZ explained on BlogName">See more about Topic XYZ on BlogName</a>

Sounds good and suiting for me, it describes the content to find on the target link.

But what if the title lenght reaches more than (ex.) 70 chars? Does Google penalize it or has any guidance for that?

Answer 1

There does not seem to be any evidence of Google using the value of a title attribute in an a element at all. The blog entry Does Adding A Title On My Links Help With Ranking? says this rather emphatically. My quick test (with a quoted string of words that appears in a title attribute in a site of mine that has been in Google indexes for a long time) gave no hit, even though both the linking and linked page can easily be found using key words that appear in their content.

It is not likely that this will change, since title attributes could easily be targets for spamdexing if search engines used them. Moreover, the popularity of such attributes in authoring is decreasing; authors tend to use “CSS tooltips” instead.

So the title attribute in a is irrelevant to search engines. You need to formulate the link text so that it is meaningful when taken in isolation.