Do anchor links pointing to bottom/top of page count as link?

[rasmusbang]

As the title says:

Do anchor links pointing to bottom/top of page count as link?

This page:

http://www.betxpert.com/forum/bookmakere/vis/ladbrokes-kommentar

I has over 300 links, but I don't see that many links. Is it the "#15" and the top/bottom of page anchors that count?

Is this harmful in terms of link juice?

-Rasmus

[JoshPugh]

I may be wrong about this, and would be happy for someone to correct me.. But..

The sharing of link juice is only to another page, and therefore a "#" anchor is not going anywhere and can't give the link juice anywhere.

Mind you, that page also has a lot of links for "Ladbrokes" and "Bet365" amongst lots of others. That's where the 300 comes from too.

[mad2k]

Agree with Josh, link juice is can say "Page benefit" but from "natural SEO" perspective such a links look more natural and they are deeper than page-link.

I think it can create a good natural link structure.

On the other hand is nice when we care about users. E.g. if you put a link with specific answer in article which is solved on FAQ page with 300 labeled links it is really helpful to put a direct address to answer than to the FAQ page. It increases page usability.

but remember about common sense, too much water drowns the miller

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Often times folks overlook the drop down links in the navigation. These count as links and are important not to ignore as it's easy to go overboard on these. On your site I counted over 100.

But to answer your question... If I understand correctly, does SEOmoz count links pointing to on-page anchors as links? I believe the answer is yes. In most cases, there are few enough anchors it doesn't present an issue. But in your case it might inflate your count and make it seem like there are more out-pointing links than there are.

The big question is, does this influence how Google or other search engines treat the issue. I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that. I suspect Google is more than sophisticated enough to note the anchor (they use these when generating sitelinks in SERPs, determining semantic relationships and other reasons) but don't count it against your crawl allowance.

So, to summarize, if it's only on-page anchors causing you to have an inflated link count, then you probably don't have much to worry about. But if you have other, real links causing this, you may want to trim down your top-heavy navigation links.