Received a big linkback today....Important question though!

I received a good linkback today and wanted to check to see what you guys think.

The link looks like this:

HTML Code:

<a href="http://www.website.com" target="_blank">Text Text  
                            <br> 
                  Text Text</a>

In other words, the person linking to me put a <br> in the middle of the anchor text. Does this devalue the link in any way or does it completely cancel out any link juice that Google may give me?

It won't effect anything towards you, but it will effect THEM on the outgoing pass.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

It won't effect anything towards you, but it will effect THEM on the outgoing pass.

Thanks for the response Brian! When you say, it will affect them on the outgoing pass, you're talking about them passing link juice....not adding the <br> within the anchor text, right?

No,

Regardless of the linkback text or anything else, the link TO you FROM them is already on THEIR site and is legit.

This linkback is a link TO them FROM you, and it's malformed a bit as their page title is likely screwed up. I'm not 100% sure how SE's will handel the br, perhaps only take the first half of the link text as the anchor value back TO them.

Apparently I'm using the term "linkback" that I'm unfamiliar with. I should have just said, link, and not linkback.

We've received that link from them, and have not linked back to them. So you're saying that search engines may only take half of the anchor text? I'll try to talk to them about it.

If they pasted

Code:

<a href="http://www.website.com" target="_blank">check out         <br> Axonaco's site</a>

it is possible that only "check out" will apply as the link title for which keyword preference will be placed. Or, they very well may just ignore any inner html inside and anchor. I'm not 100% sure what they do. Either way, if its from a good site, its still a huge link in to have.

Thanks again Brian. They have corrected the html for the link after I asked. The link is on a 14 year old site that's related to my niche with a PR6 AND they've placed me on a number of PR5 pages within the same domain. In fact, they've placed me on about 950 out of 2500 pages indexed pages. Not exactly a site-wide link, which is probably a good thing.

Edit: Strange, I had responded to a post, and quoted it in this response, but now the post is gone and so is the quoted text in this response.

We currently have a PR4, but just recently were quoted in huffingtonpost, lifehacker, and consumerist.com in the past 2 months. Hoping that will help for SERP.