Do Page Anchors Affect SEO?

[Virginia-Girtz]

Hi everyone,

I've been researching for the past hour and I cannot find a definitive answer anywhere! Can someone tell me if page anchors affect SEO at all? I have a client that has 9 page anchors on one landing page on their website - which means if you were to scroll through their website, the page is really really long!

I always thought that by using page anchors instead of sending users through to a dedicated landing page, ranking for those keywords makes it harder because a search spider will read all the content on that landing page and not know how to rank for individual keywords? Am I wrong?

The client in particular sells furniture, so on their landing page they have page anchors that jump the user down to "tables" or "chairs" or "lighting" for example. You can then click on one of the product images listed in that section of the page anchor and go through to an individual product page.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Thanks!

[EGOL]

Just my opinion, and others might disagree.... I believe that page anchors are second behind the title tag for onpage optimization.  I believe that Google likes them and if you have a page that is long enough to justify them that some visitors will see them and click them instead of leaving and be taken down the page to the information that they want.

I have lots of pages with onpage anchors.  These pages pull in tons of longtail traffic.  I have been adding them to more pages because I think that they are kickass.

If I was searching for brass widgets and landed on a page and didn't see them in my first view I might leave.  But if I saw a bold obvious link to BRASS WIDGETS I would click it.

[netzkern_AG]

I think that page anchor's importance is increasing. Moz has pointed out that long content tends to rank better (for in-depth articles) than short content. The (shortened) logic being that it is better to present one articles that gives readers everything (and maybe a bit extra) rather than forcing them to do another search.

Personally I am a fan of a Table of Contents that links to the sub-headings in an article. (For Wordpress there is the rather good plugin Table of Contents Plus. It ads an anchor to all <h[1-6]>with an id that equates to the heading, replacing certain invalid signs.)  Google also likes this and USES the anchors: When you Google for https://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia+en+SEO+Methods&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 , for example, you will get an extra "Jump to"-link that gets you directly to the relevant paragraph (or what google thinks is the most relevant paragraph for your search query anyway). This, of course, needs anchors.</h[1-6]>

I do not know how many people actually use these anchor-links and would be very much interested in that data. Personally I find this very nifty and would recommend it. It is not that much extra effort in most cases and it adds a very useful feature - also for linkbuildling and sharing.

You should of course consider possible implications for tracked scroll-depth and such stuff!

And for exactly that reason I would here chose different pages for tables, chairs etc - how would you know what people were searching for exactly? (So far I mostly used anchors for articles, not for different product sections). As I see it, that starting page is more a "furniture" landing page than a dedicated "tables" or "chairs" landing page.

[EGOL]

There is a good example of "table of contents" links in this Moz Blog article by John-Henry Scherck.

https://moz.com/blog/link-prospectors-into-lead-generators

He used bullets and that format is good because his subheadings are long.  Mine are usually short, correspond to keywords and can be separated by pipes.

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