Does Google Still Pass Anchor Text for Multiple Links to the Same Page When Using a Hashtag? What About Indexation?

[Spencer_LuminInteractive]

Both of these seem a little counter-intuitive to me so I want to make sure I'm on the same page.

I'm wondering if I need to add "#s to my internal links when the page I'm linking to is already:

a.) in the site's navigation

b.) in the sidebar

More specifically, in your experience...do the search engines only give credit to (or mostly give credit to) the anchor text used in the navigation and ignore the anchor text used in the body of the article?

I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed.

Just so I understand this...

a.) if I were use a hashtag at the end of a link as the first link in the body of a page, this means that the rest of the article won't be indexed?

b.) if I use a table of contents at the top of a page and link to places within the document, then only the areas of the page up to the table of contents will be indexed/crawled?

Thanks ahead of time! I really appreciate the help.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Howdy Spencer!

Whoa! Lot's of questions here. Let's see if we can sort this out.

There's a lot of debate around this, and for the most part most SEOs consider the use of hashes okay for user experience, but mostly minor when it comes to influencing search results.

Here's what we know. Google indexes the first anchor text in the HTML. This is not necessarily the same thing as the first anchor on the visible page, as the HTML/CSS can be arranged so that links appear above others on the page.

That said, folks have experimented and found ways to get additional anchors indexed, including the use of hash tags. That said, what we don't know is how much weight/authority these links pass. It's generally believed (and I support this) that they probably don't pass as much value to the page as previous links.

If you have a link in your navigation, and another in the text body further down in the HTML, Google will index the first anchor, but most likely not the 2nd in most circumstances. Does this mean Google doesn't pass any value through the second? There's a lot of debate about this (read the comments here:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/all-about-anchor-text-whiteboard-friday)

I find it best not to micro-manage your links and simply keep the following in mind: If you want a link to pass as much value and authority as possible, place it in the body of the page.

Certainly there's a case made for using named anchors (#). They're good for navigation and user experience, and we see search engines pick them up in search results, but the value gained by manipulating them for ranking purposes is likely negligible.

"I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed."

Hmm.... I've never heard of that, and it sounds fishy. Love to see any research that's been done.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.