Quick Tip: Google Sub-links Your Anchor Tags
Posted on 02'10 Apr
I recently got an enquiry from someone who said they found my website via the search term ‘best fonts for logos‘. Curious on where I ranked for this peculiar term, I Googled it and was surprised to find that Just Creative Design had the top two positions for this particular phrase, although this wasn’t my biggest surprise.
What I found more surprising was the sub-link ‘Fonts For Logos‘ found underneath the second result (see red arrow above). I soon found out that this sub-link was showing up in Google search results because I had created anchor tags in my article using the <name> attribute. The label used was ‘#fonts’.
I hadn’t done this intentionally for SEO purposes but rather to help people navigate the large list of logo resources via a sub navigation. Perhaps with the knowledge that Google uses these anchor tags in their search results, it’s worth considering using them more often?
What do you think, is it worth the effort?
Update: 23/8/2010
It seems that Google is no longer using these sub-links. Thanks for the tip Kay.
SEO Resources
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23 JUST™ Creative Comments
I would think if Google is taking these anchor links, that it would account for whether the link was relative. E.g. if I link to /about, they should change it to http://jonraasch.com/about.
So with the hash here, shouldn’t it have done the same, pointed you to http://yoursite.com/your-post#your-hash?
Very handy. Thanks for sharing.
WOW cool.
Thanks for the info Jacob.
Keep on rocking.
Interesting. I hadn’t noticed this before. Let’s see how much Google will use this feature.
Jon,
It has done that… see the link ‘Fonts For Logos’. It deep links to the place in that article that features fonts for logos.
Jacob Hi
How are you? After long time I visit your blog and now read your posts.Thanks for the information.
Best Regards
Rupam
Very interesting, never heard about anchor links before.
I’ve never heard of anchor links – thanks for sharing. JCD usually comes up in the top rankings in quite a lot of Google searches actually..
Jacob,
Thank You very much for sharing this. Ive never heard of this before and will never look anchor tags quite the same! Cheers and keep up the good work!
I’ve never seen something like that, thanks for the info.
That is quite interesting, Jacob, thanks for sharing. I might have to consider doing that as well, though I had to look up your link on w3schools to fully understand it.
Out of curiosity, I googled the same term and you came into 3rd & 4th place for me, and reverse of how you have it listed here. I wonder if it is because your search location is different than mine? At first I was thinking because you are Australia and I am America, but then I remembered you moved to NY. Interesting, nevertheless.
Thanks for helpful tips. I have seen your website has a list of links under the main link in google. Can you tell us how to achieve that?
thank you for sharing this….really appreciate that
Chris,
Yeah I’ve found that as well, back home in Australia my rankings were a bit lower in search results but when I moved to the States they were 1-2 higher. This may have something to do with the servers being hosted in the US as well as other variables such as local businesses.
Tin,
After your site has gained some credibility it adds the links there for you. There is no way to turn them on manually. Google controls it.
Very interesting and a good thing to know. May have to start testing anchor tags to see if they show in Google.
Just so you know, you can link to any element on the page with an ID. You don’t need to use [a name=''] [/a] at all (in fact I would recommend not doing so – you shouldn’t be creating elements purely for functional purposes).
How do you create anchor tags? I would be interested in doing this for my graphic design website
Paul,
Follow the link in the anchor tag article linked above, it will teach you how to do the anchor tags.
Thanks a lot for sharing. Very helpful tip.
Hi JC, is this still a working thing?
Seems like Google was experimenting and – at least here in Germany – i can not find your page(s) in top positions any longer, though they’re on the first page yet.
Looks like this was valuable half a year ago but seems to be irrelevant now.
Yet, i think it might not be too bad to use ‘name’d anchor tags anyway.
Suggestions or ideas anyone?
@JacobCass:
The geo location of your servers do matters for the search results.
Hi Kay,
I just checked and it seems you are correct! It seems to have phased out… and my search results are no longer at the top.
I’ll keep on reading blogposts and tweets though ;)
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