SEO - is long link content a good idea?

Question

the link:

<a href="http://site.com/category/the-post-title"&gt;
<img src="http://site.com/image.jpg />Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy
nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat
volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation
ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse
molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis
at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit
praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait
nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend
option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat...
</a>

Does the fact that this link has a lot of stuff in it have any impact on the site search engine position?

Aesthetically these type of links are great, you can add nice roll-overs on them and stuff like that :) Also they make the life o the visitors easier, because they don't have to focus their mouse on a small area to get to the page they want...

Answer 1

Yeah, say goodbye to your users with screen readers.

Answer 2

Who knows, it's all voodoo. Since search engines don't release their algorithms for ranking sites, anyone who tells you different is at best guessing.

Create great content, publish according to guidelines. Make your site accessible as possible. Any "Tricks" usually don't work and might get you listed lower.

Answer 3

This blog posting (from 2008?) and this blog post from 2005 answer the SEO aspect of the question, but I think there's more to it - the semantics. I feel that the text in your anchor tag should be sufficiently long to provide a title or brief description of what you are linking to. The longest thing that should be in an anchor tag is a full citation in your favorite citation format. My thinking is that if I parse through your page and pull out everything in an anchor tag with an href attribute, I should be able to get a concise list of things you link to.

An example is if you look at this answer. If you parsed the HTML of this answer, a machine would be able to easily determine that I link to two blog posts. If you have a wall of text in your anchor tags, this might not be the case.