Empty href damages SEO? (href="#")

[prozis]

Hello,

I'm analyzing a website with thousands of pages.
I realized that on many of them they have empty links such href="#".

I wonder if that will cause any SEO damage, or if Google will just ignore it as there isn't any link?

I was reading about it and people seems to not be sure, although they recommend on forums to user the CSS pointer clickable instead of empty link.

Let me know your opinion on this please!

Thank you in advance!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

Is there a reason they are there? Do they serve any purpose at all?

I would be surprised if Google did anything with them and would probably just see it as a bit of spurious code. Are you able to share an example?

-Andy

[prozis]

Hey,

Well they are the maybe because some bug importing, and there are thousands of them like that.
We do not need that for any reason. Problem is that I will just request a change in case of being bad for SEO, otherwise it can be expensive to have someone spending days on that just because...

https://www.prozis.com/pt/pt/xcore/xtreme-l-carnitine-3000mg-20-vials

If you go almost to the footer, you will see on bold this heading - under that you have some bulletins with the # link that I referred:

Principais Benefícios de Xtreme L-Carnitine 3000

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It looks like it's been done to activate certain functions, but it might have been a bit of a lazy way to do it.

However, because of the fact that they are a null link but they might show a description or more information, I can't see that this would ever cause issues to SEO.

Have you noticed that there has been any drop in positions that make you feel like they could be causing problems?

-Andy

[ThomasHarvey]

Something i'd never thought about: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/anchor-links.html

So looks to not have an impact according to that article.

[CPR_PTANTONO]

In my opinion, pertaining to your case of "empty links", does it affect SEO? The answer probably lies in the amount of it. Maybe there is no direct impact if there is maybe 1 or 2 or even 10 links. In summary, yes it does affect SEO in the sense of it is not able to pass the juice. Think about a nice or highly searched keyword in an article - [Some nice keywords] and this anchor text does not go anywhere. The link equity probably gets passed no where and probably limited to that page only. With regards to relevance, it will probably give search engines signals that this page is no longer relevant and therefore affecting the frequency of the crawl for that domain/subdomain/page. Indirectly and overtime, this will affect SERP for that domain.

As far as how many empty href wills start affecting SEO? It will be interesting to see this experiment. Any takers? I'll leave this to the SEO heavy weights or SEO nerds.

Correction: I agree to Andy's comment below.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I think you need to take a look at the page and how these have been used because it sounds like you haven't understood what the actual problem is fully.

With regards to relevance, it will probably give search engines signals that this page is no longer relevant and therefore affecting the frequency of the crawl for that domain/subdomain/page

It won't do that because they aren't complete links.

This is basically a means to an end. It serves a purpose and while there are better options to achieve what they want, this is certainly not an SEO issue.

-Andy

[Highland]

The only reason to use a fragment (the hashtag part of a URL is called a fragment) as your anchor, is that you're adding that link solely for the purpose of tying it to a DOM event (like an onclick event). There's better ways to do this in modern web programming, but it's still possible to see some old school sites doing

link

By definition, fragments exist solely for the client. Your web server will not log them. Google Analytics does not natively track them. So clicking on an empty fragment like that will just take you back to the top of your page (provided the JS doesn't stop the event). There's nothing to track. But there's something interesting to note here

link

Google can actually do some basic JS and it will recognize this bad attempt at link obfuscation as an actual link. So if you have links similar to this (which is not recommended) then those links will be counted as links. Be aware of this if you're worried about backlinks.

[CPR_PTANTONO]

Thank you for the insight. I agree with your insight. You are correct in saying that it will affect signals because there is no link. And also not an SEO issue.