Does rel="home" on an anchor tag (<a>) do anything helpful?
The rel="page"
was part of an initiative to create permalinks (see section 'Permalink detection') as part of a standard in HTML 4.
However with HTML 5 it now has no purpose and does not offer any accessibility or SEO value. It also might not validate using W3C validator anymore (not tested).
rel="something"
should only be used on <link>
elements, with the exception of rel="noopener"
, rel="nofollow"
or rel="noreferrer"
on anchors (<a>
tags).
Note - There may be other rel=""
for hyperlinks but the two stated are the only ones I can think of, it is no longer valid to use it for page locations, bookmarks etc.
Update
Thanks to @Sean who pointed out in the comments other elements can accept rel=""
, however MicroFormats are not the preferred way of adding structured data according to Google and their development is not as full fledged as using https://schema.org and JSON+LD
.
“We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data come out for JSON-LD first. So that’s what we prefer.” - John Mueller
I am obviously incorrect in what I said as it is perfectly valid, however personally I would not bother and stick with what Google prefers apart from the few items I listed.
See @Sean's answer for a bit more info on the subject.
for clarity rel=""
has no bearing on accessibility