A Survey of Rel Values on the Web

One of the interesting things about sharing an office with Jyri is that our free-association stream-of-consciousness conversations often lead to places worth exploring further.

On Friday Jyri and I started wondering about the link rel values documented in the XFN 1.1 profile, which include not only the relatively commonplace me and friend values, but also such unconventional values such as colleague, muse, and spouse. But how frequently are the lesser known rel values really used? Rather than speculate blindly, I wrote a simple mapreduce to check the web and find out for sure.

The mapreduce scanned approximately 177 million recently crawled HTML documents, parsing and counting rel values in link and anchor tags along the way. In those 177M documents, I found just over 19 billion <a> and <link> tags in total. And of those 19B tags, 1.8 billion of them contained a non-empty rel attribute.

Following the HTML5 rules for space separated tokens I split each rel value on [\s\t\n\r\f] and extracted each individual value. In total, over 1.9B instances of rel values were found, or an average of just over 10 per HTML document (with some tags having more than one rel value).

I found a staggering 1.8M unique rel value strings in use, with many used only once or twice across all the web. In fact, the top 6 most-frequently-used rel values accounted for 80% of all usage, and the top 11 alone were responsible for 90% of all usage. In fact, less than 1000 of the most frequently unique rel values are sufficient to represent the 99th percentile of all usage. In other words, the tail is long indeed, with the remainder of those 1.8M unique rel values accounting for less than 1% of the total usage.

In passing, I noticed that approximately 3 million rel value strings also contained a comma character; presumably cases where the author may mistakenly have thought that the "," character would be used as a delimiter. However, since these cases account for just 0.18% of all rel value strings, they have little impact in the overall totals.

Here are the top 25 rel values found in <a> and <link> tags in a moderately sized sample of the web today:

Rank	Value	Count	Relative Frequency
1	nofollow	832980014
2	stylesheet	338648161
3	tag	168764800
4	alternate	109150404
5	icon	69183607
6	chapter	56395793
7	forum	55920646
8	shortcut	53906964
9	bookmark	30683701
10	archives	25381711
11	category	24361195
12	external	19181232
13	search	14227485
14	edituri	8109835
15	apple-touch-icon	6753583
16	help	4842211
17	prev	4537344
18	next	4390373
19	pingback	4302068
20	wlwmanifest	4125573
21	contents	3959350
22	contact	3504587
23	service.post	2678873
24	top	2502015
25	me	2501273

The most frequently used values are not surprising at all. The nofollow value is used as a hint to search engines that the target of an <a> tag should not be used in ranking calculations. The stylesheet value is used on <link> tags to indicate that the target is an external CSS document. The tag is a microformat used to indicate a category for the page, as popularized by sites such as Technorati and Delicious. And alternate is frequently used to facilitate the autodiscovery of an RSS or Atom feed for a given site.

Further down we learn that as OpenID continues to gain in adoption the openid.server and openid.delegate rel values come in at #35 and #43 respectively -- impressive, since each are only needed once per-page. And even the newer OpenID2-style tags not far behind, with openid2.provider and openid2.local_id reaching #51 and #837 respectively.

Near and dear to my heart, I was pleased to see the search rel value, the OpenSearch discovery mechanism, ranked so high at #13. Again these discovery links are only needed once per page; a sign of strong adoption. Admittedly, not all rel="search" links are OpenSearch related, but I have another more comprehensive analysis of OpenSearch documents that shows similarly pervasive adoption rates.

Even the newly agreed-uponcanonical rel value makes a showing at #271, and will surely rise to the top 25 or so over the next year or two.

And the XFN rel values? The contact rel value is the most common at #22, with me and friend just behind at #25 and #28 respectively. Filling out the list are acquaintance (#58), met (#68), colleague (#84), co-worker (#126), neighbor (#180), muse (#196), co-resident (#232), parent (#255), sibling (#414), sweetheart (#446), spouse (#570), crush (#794), kin (#834), child (#879), with date bringing up the rear at #1086.

This survey indicates that rel values are both widely and meaningfully used, with adoption being driven by a wide array of needs, such as semantic markup, search engine hints, client-side rendering, discovery and identity protocols, blogging, and/or content that can be later edited.

But more importantly, we learned that a full 0.0003% of all the links have declared, for all the world to see, that some URI out there is their source of inspiration, their Calliope, their Erato, their muse.