_base_href in anchor tag, black-hat?

[BrianR2]

Hi,

I'm trying to assess the quality of a backlink to my site and I noticed that in the anchor tag there is a _base_href property that points to a different url than the href portion:

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.mysite.com" title="My Site" _base_href="http://www.someothersite.tv/industry/">My Site</a>

I'm wondering if this is some sort of redirect or some other black-hat technique to avoid having outgoing links. Does anyone know anything about the _base_href property?

Thanks,
Brian.

[Shoemoney]

I do not believe that is black hat.

[adamjthompson]

See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.4

Looks to me like the webmaster is incorrectly implementing it...

[BrianR2]

I think that the <base href="" is different. I came across both of them when searching and I kept seeing _base_href coming up in a php context but the results weren't helpful.

[Nathan Malone]

Yahoo has a similar tag at the top of their pages.

My guess is that this webmaster just implemented the tag incorrectly, so you might want to contact them and let them know. Perhaps running that particular page through W3C's Validator would provide some useful info...

[chrisd]

Probably forgot to change that aspect of the HTML tag from the original template (using a WYSIWYG HTML editor?).

It looks like that instruction could play a role for all relative images, in CSS & JavaScript references. I've never seen it or used it in anchor tag.

I would try to bring this issue to the author's attention.

This is most likely not related, but in ATutor a php vulnerability using _base_href was released about 2 months ago.
Details:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=cross+scripting+_base_href

[BrianR2]

Thanks for all your replies. Seems that it's probably not black-hat but if I come across it again I'll run the html validator.