Recently, an innovative SEO engineer by the name of Errioxa claims he uncovered an odd way Google handles links. His testing confirms that using internal text anchors like the one shown below means Google will credit the unique anchor text for each unique anchor link.
<a href=”http://www.domain.com/page.html#LINKANCHOR“> (Unique anchor text is underlined)
We’ll try our best to explain what’s going on here so beginners beware, this may seem a bit confusing.
Say you have a homepage and you want to link out to another page on your site that has information about cars and trucks. In the past, Google would typically only credit the first link on the page and ignore the other two. Meaning, if the first link has cars and second has trucks as its anchor text, Google would only use cars to define what the page is about and ignore the trucks (2nd) link.
Errioxa discovered that if you have three links to your cars and trucks page like the ones shown below, Google will ignore the first and credit the other two. This observation lines up with Google’s recent interest in internal anchors, which are sometimes within the site’s URL you see displayed on a search engine results page.
- <a href=”http://www.domain.com/carsandtrucks.html”>Cars & Trucks</a>
- <a href=”http://www.domain.com/page.html#DOGS”>Cars</a>
- <a href=”http://www.domain.com/page.html#CATS”>Trucks</a>
In the above example, someone searching for cars would be taken directly to your specific page on the topic…this is a big help to users but also may be a way to get more unique anchor text attributed to your page that focuses on multiple topics.
More experimentation needs to be done to measure the true effectiveness of this approach. We hope to do this when and where we can and report back any results.
We could very well find this to be a good strategy for better control of a site’s links, which is why Google started paying attention to internal anchors in the first place since they provide their users with a streamlined way of accessing information on a website.