It’s a bit early to be thinking about SEO, but as time progresses it will become more of a concern, especially for a site facing the World Wide Web. As it turns out, target has practically no SEO value unless it affects the quality of the site. It is a bad idea to use the attribute if the URL is to a local site resource. It kills the Back button so the user has no history to fall back on when attempting to return to the page that sent them there. For this reason, it should be reserved only for links to other sites.
Bottom line, use this attribute with great care and deliberation. Do not treat it trivially.
I noticed something, when there is no target attribute I left click on the link and it bring out options (open in new tab, open in new browser ), my question is if the option can bring out (open in new tab) without adding the target attribute, why do we need the target attribute?
We don’t, really. It is a left over from the very early days of web browsers when the interface was often built around ‘frames’ (something to read up on from the distant past). It’s actually discouraged these days since it can ‘break the back button’ (another thing to read up on).
Why no discussion of adding rel=“noopener, noreferrer” to any link with target=“_blank” to prevent exploitation of the newly-opened page by phishing sites via the JS window.opener? Or has that hole been fixed since I learned HTML5? It has been a few years.
), but Opera also helped to promote it in the early 2Ks.