As far as I know, anchor links should never hurt your SEO. Please consult with Google, though, and see what they say.

If I put anchor links, the hash kind external links from elsewhere, at the top of my page linking to content further down, does that damage the rank or not?

For example my site does bodybuilding software – if I put the phrase “bodybuilding software” and link to the software section of that page, would engines ignore that text completely or still realise the site is about the topic of such software?

Alan

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

The purpose of this is to make the entire site out of AJAX requests, while still retaining bookmarkable URLs, back button functionality, and search engine spiderability.

While using the hash for this is a bit of a bastardization of it’s initial purpose, this is really just a proof of concept – AJAX can be implemented so it maintains user experience and degrades well if you put the effort in. It’s a whole pile better than Microsoft’s attempt at AJAX + usability on their recent revamp.

Anyway, does it effect my SEO?

A little bit. When someone links to http://www.ragepank.com/#contact/ Google sees this as a homepage link, not a link to the contact page. If a javascript enabled browser goes to that address, they get to see the contact page.

From my point of view, I’m getting more homepage links and less deep links than I normally would. This isn’t great, but I can live with it.

I have never seen any search engine index the hashed version of my URLs in the 6 months I have been testing this system. I am also yet to see a hashed URL be given a pagerank, so I’m reasonably convinced that Google ignores the hash.

Probably not the same SEO company, since this is a UK-specific one, but there’s plenty of them like that out there.

I couldn’t agree more. Well put!

If your site is rubbish, Google won’t bother. And that’s a good thing! Don’t spend your time optimizing your site with SEO tricks, but spend your time writing quality content that attracts visitors in a natural, ‘organic’ way, Google will follow and you WILL get good rankings.

Why not add rel=”nofollow” to the anchors?

Why should we use a nonvalid value of the rel attribute?

List of valid link types

Cheers.

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going for here.

Once a potential customer gets to your site, how long do they stay, how many pages did they view?

Content is king.

Why not add rel=”nofollow” to the anchors?

But is it necessary? If, as people says, search engines already dismiss anchor links, there’s no need for it, right? Besides, nofollow is just something made up for search engines and doesn’t, in true meaning, convey an actual relation.

So, it has a value in certain contexts (like trying to avoid spam in your blog comments…), but I don’t think it should be overused.

The website owner should understand that readable and concise premium content embedded in the document structure should be first.

With readable content I mean both machine-readibility for search-engines which means a semantic document structure (weighted content for SEO purposes), using easy to understand language (concise content for SEM and a usability feature or human-readibility). But in the end both are intertwined …

Well, yes and no. Good semantics is the key to good accessibility, and good semantics also helps search engines to properly and correctly weight the content in your web site.

Let me rephrase my remark, accessibility contribute to make websites user-friendly and more searchengine-friendly. But for the end-user! A user-centric approach which has nothing to do with the website author = companies. Companies need to understand that accessibility features are user-centric and should be a layer constructed that does not interfere with the level of usability. The website owner should understand that readable and concise premium content embedded in the document structure should be first.

Why not add rel=”nofollow” to the anchors?

Thanks, interesting link (I always like Mike’s writings). I think it’s fine that good content and linkage gets the highest ranking. I think good semantics pays off to a certain degree, at least, but I know what I don’t want: shady, inaccessible methods paying off.

icaaq,

Yeah, maybe. As long as they’re ignored, that’s fine with me.

Johan,

Accessibility has nothing to do with SEO or SEM, it is a usability feature.

Well, yes and no. Good semantics is the key to good accessibility, and good semantics also helps search engines to properly and correctly weight the content in your web site.

Stefan,

Don’t worry, I’m just happy if I can write a post that inspires someone to express their feelings about it!

Just as I said to icaaq: as long as anchor links are ignored, that’s fine with me. But I can never see why usage of them would in any way be frowned upon by search engines.

First of all, indexing the pages comes down to checking for the things search engines value, not to validate every element on a page. So a spider would home in on page name, titles, keywords, the full text, in short: things that define the content. Then it compares all those with each other to calculate relevancy of each and to look for keyword spamming and other bad stuff.

Off course link relevancy is also checked: by following them and doing the same thing there. Following anchors equals performing the same checks again on the same content, so that seems not the way to go.

Spiders are written for speed: they have to crawl the net, and last time I checked there were a few billion pages out there.

Ever used W3C validator (that’s a rethorical question off course )? It takes a few seconds for even a small page to be validated. This is because it checks each and every element, and this costs time. Imagine Google spiders doing the same thing: their index would take ages to be build and it would be hopelessly out of date…

@icaaq
As I said: anchor validating would consist of validating a page twice or more. Sure this would mean we get a duplicated content penalty. This alone is enough reason to believe they’re just ignored. Doing the things spiders need to do is hard enough to make in a small and fast application. Adding logic to compare an anchor and the content it points to isn’t all that easy when you think about it. It get’s rather bloated very fast and that is contrary to the design of spiders.

What IS that content belonging to an anchor in fact? The paragraph, div, element where the anchor is nested in? Also the following tags with text in them? Where does that content end then? What about anchor’s pointing to pictures, just evaluate any title property attached (if any)? Imagine writing RegExp’s for that !!!

@ Tanny O’Haley
Right on man. Good semantics provide good content a better relevancy rating, but bad content will never rank high these days, except when it’s visited by thousands of people each hour. Site popularity is by far a better way to rank high than writing semantically perfect pages.

@all
Seems to me that the BS-factor is quite high with the statement of the SEO company guy. I think we can all safely assume that our trusted and well-known techniques for SEO are still valid as they are. So let’s just file this one under a large stack of other obsolete stuff and forget about it.

@me
Stop writing novels on other people’s pages!!!

Accessibility has nothing to do with SEO or SEM, it is a usability feature.

About the internal links issue maybe the SEO company got it by the wrong foot and thought that a internal link is indexed on the same way as a dynamic link, which they are not. Searchengines does not care for the hashmark what so ever.

But in that way the searchengines would index the same content under different pages which gives a bad ranking, at least on google.

Cheers.

Although good semantics are somewhat valuable in optimization, simple things like proper titles, descriptive filenames, and incoming links are dramatically more important.

And as for Web standards.

The findings do support my initial suspicions about web standards as they relate to SEO though: that they matter about as much as a cheap umbrella in a hailstorm. That is to say: “kind of”.

Developers should write clean, semantic code as a matter of professionalism rather than search engine optimization. For good SEO, making your site sticky enough to attract quality incoming links is by far and away the thing to concentrate on.

It looks like well written content is most important for SEO ranking.

Jason,

Yes, to some degree, that’s correct; but hopefully, most people will appreciate a quality web site that they like, and don’t use it solely for low prices.

Ash,

To clarify: I don’t think search engines indexes actual anchor links, but rather just ignore them. What I mean with that statement is once the visitor is at your web site, accessibility and usability will be better, and that’s why they’ll prefer the web site with the anchor links.

As long as they ignore them, that’s just fine. But I need proof for that.

Deborah,

Absolutely, but I think it’s a distinction between anchor text and the actual internal anchor linking.