How does Google see page #anchors in URLs for keyword ranking?

[FlashDriveDT]

As you may know one can place internal anchors on a page and link to them. The resulting URL looks like this xxx.site.com/brandX#ProductY. Now in order to rank for "ProductY" would it be acceptable for Google to use that anchor link or would it be better to just use "xxx.site.com/brandX"?

The reason Im asking is because I have plenty of brand overview pages that list several products of that brand on one page. It only recently occured to me that I may be able to rank better in Google for the individual product names if I were to place an anchor and use that as the url. Does anyone know?

Unfortunately I have already done quite a few backlink campaigns were I always used "xxx.site.com/brandX" as the links for "brandX productY" or "brandX productZ". It has been working pretty ok since I got good SEO title tags that usually include "brandX productY" or "brandX productZ". But I'm thinking I may do a little better with this anchor tweak seeing that some of the products with their product names are way down on the page (and actually not all of them are in the SEO title tag).

Unless of course Google gets confused with this and sees "xxx.site.com/brandX#ProductY" as a completely different url than just "xxx.site.com/brandX"? If that was the case I would lose the keyword rank I have already in place. If Google however sees that its basically the same page url then I may not lose my rank and get a boost from the following refined "xxx.site.com/brandX#ProductY" backlink campaigns.

I hope it is clear what my dilemma is. I would appreciate any advice and feedback from experience with this type of keyword linking. Thanks!

[InternetMarketingIQ]

Google will index the page not the anchor on the page. Test it and see for yourself by visiting other sites using page anchors.

[billionareHuman]

an anchor is a jump to some content within the same page that means we would be asking google to index the same page twice and treat it as separate pages which they are not.

The better way is to create individual product pages, change your anchor text links to links to the product pages.

You will also convert better this way as they user will only see information for the 1 product on the page rather than seeing your other products too

[FlashDriveDT]

Originally Posted by InternetMarketingIQ

Google will index the page not the anchor on the page. Test it and see for yourself by visiting other sites using page anchors.

I understand that. But my question was refering to my backlink campaigns. If I was using anchor text "brand X product Z" and left the following link with that: "xxx.site.com/brandX#productZ" where "#productZ" is the page internal anchor, wouldnt that mean Google indexes it this way and have it appear as my keyword ranking? Or will Google only recognize the "xxx.site.com/brandX" as the url and use that for the ranking?

Originally Posted by billionareHuman

The better way is to create individual product pages, change your anchor text links to links to the product pages.

You will also convert better this way as they user will only see information for the 1 product on the page rather than seeing your other products too

Yeah I realize now that its better to have one page for each product. But its kinda too late in the game for me now and my initial goal was to give an overview of a specific brand per page. Hence I'm trying to come up with a more specific solution via the page internal anchors and using them in the urls for my backlink campaigns. If I was to set up new single pages for all the products now I would have to go back and change a lot of urls from my previous backlink campaigns, I don't think that would be desirable neither for me nor google. (Seeing that google may not reindex them all again, it took me a lot of effort to get google to index some of my backlinks) So I'm still not sure if I should leave things just as they are or from now on use the #anchor tactic...?

[dburk]

Hi FlashDriveDT,

Google sorts SERPs by relevance and backlinks can influence that relevancy score. You may not realize that the anchor text of your outbound links, external or internal, also significantly influence your page's relevancy score.

From my experience, I have not seen a direct benefit from using keywords after a pound sign unless it's part of the anchor text of that inbound link. Search engines seem to ignore anything after the pound sign within a URL.

However, you can get a great deal of benefit by including keywords within the anchor text for anchors that link to sections of the same page. I first noticed this on FAQ pages where I placed a lot of internal links to sections of the same document. These type of links are a lot easier to get, since you place them yourself on your own web page, and they reduce the number of backlinks necessary to rank your page in the SERP.

Don't take my word for this, test it yourself and let us know what you learn!

[FlashDriveDT]

Originally Posted by dburk

However, you can get a great deal of benefit by including keywords within the anchor text for anchors that link to sections of the same page. I first noticed this on FAQ pages where I placed a lot of internal links to sections of the same document. These type of links are a lot easier to get, since you place them yourself on your own web page, and they reduce the number of backlinks necessary to rank your page in the SERP.

Hello dburk, thanks for the feedback. Could you please specify the above section? I don't think I'm quite following you...it ain't easy with all the terms hehe. So maybe you can give an example for what you mean. How does the anchor text have to look like and how the url?

I have done some backlinks now using the structure "xxx.com/brandX#productZ" and can say that the # is indeed ignored, together with the corresponding page internal anchor. In other words Google does not list me for the keyword together with that url, only with "xxx.com/brandX" which is still pretty good.So I do get the link juice either way.

However, this is not optimal for the audience as someone already mentioned (since they first have to scroll through a few other products before getting to productZ on my page). So I saw this with wikipedia and I was wondering if this would work with my website? Example keyword: "Genetics and biochemistry of hair color" shows up in the SERPs like this:
Genetics and biochemistry of hair color - Google Search
Notice how Google offers the article on Human_hair_color with a link underneath the title tag "Jump to Genetics and biochemistry of hair color". This is a link directly to the page internal anchor that marks that section of "Human hair color".

This would be almost perfect for what I'm trying to do. Google doesn't index me like this though for my #anchors/backlinks. So I took a look at the html code in the wiki article and this is what is shows:

<h2><span class="editsection">[<a href="/w/index.php?title=Human_hair_color&amp;action=edit&amp;section=1" title="Edit section: Genetics and biochemistry of hair color">edit</a>]</span> <span class="mw-headline" id="Genetics_and_biochemistry_of_hair_color">Genetics and biochemistry of hair color</span></h2>

Does anyone know what's important here? Is this something wiki specific that Google only allows with Wikipedia or do you guys think it's transferable to any website? If I knew what html code to use to trigger Google to give me that "Jump to" link I would greatly appreciate it.

[FlashDriveDT]

Ok, I just found Googles own guidelines for this:
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using named anchors to identify sections on your pages
So everyone can do this. Lets see if I'm able to implement!