What is the function of the html "rel" attribute? [closed]

Question

I understand that rel got something to do with relationships between things (documents? elements?) but I don't really get anything past that. What exactly does it do when used in the achor tag ? Also, are there specific values for x in rel="x"?

Answer 1

Typically they are used to provide information to search engines about the structure of your website. For instance, you can give links a next or prev rel attribute for paginating links (links which show the next/last set of search results), or you could supply a canonical value to tell search engines which is the default link for the page it is looking at (sometimes pages are accessible via a number of different links, and this avoids indexing of duplicate content which could hurt your SEO).

Here are couple of links from Google regarding best usage:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394