Quick Tip: Google Sub-links Your Anchor Tags

Published on Friday, April 2, 2010 – 2:19 am

Google Sublinks Anchor Tags

I recently got an enquiry from someone who said they found my website via the search term ‘best fonts for logos‘. Curious on where I ranked for this peculiar term, I Googled it and was surprised to find that Just Creative Design had the top two positions for this particular phrase, although this wasn’t my biggest surprise.

What I found more surprising was the sub-link ‘Fonts For Logos‘ found underneath the second result (see red arrow above). I soon found out that this sub-link was showing up in Google search results because I had created anchor tags in my article using the <name> attribute. The label used was ‘#fonts’.

I hadn’t done this intentionally for SEO purposes but rather to help people navigate the large list of logo resources via a sub navigation. Perhaps with the knowledge that Google uses these anchor tags in their search results, it’s worth considering using them more often?

What do you think, is it worth the effort?

Update: 23/8/2010

It seems that Google is no longer using these sub-links. Thanks for the tip Kay.

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Posted in: Blogging 23 Comments »


23 Responses to “Quick Tip: Google Sub-links Your Anchor Tags”

  1. Jon Raasch on Apr 2, 2010 said:

    I would think if Google is taking these anchor links, that it would account for whether the link was relative. E.g. if I link to /about, they should change it to http://jonraasch.com/about.

    So with the hash here, shouldn’t it have done the same, pointed you to http://yoursite.com/your-post#your-hash?

  2. nomi on Apr 2, 2010 said:

    Very handy. Thanks for sharing.

  3. Smashy Design on Apr 2, 2010 said:

    WOW cool.
    Thanks for the info Jacob.

    Keep on rocking.

  4. Tuomas Tolppi on Apr 2, 2010 said:

    Interesting. I hadn’t noticed this before. Let’s see how much Google will use this feature.

  5. Jacob Cass on Apr 2, 2010 said:

    Jon,
    It has done that… see the link ‘Fonts For Logos’. It deep links to the place in that article that features fonts for logos.

  6. rupam on Apr 2, 2010 said:

    Jacob Hi
    How are you? After long time I visit your blog and now read your posts.Thanks for the information.

    Best Regards
    Rupam

  7. Sirkka on Apr 2, 2010 said:

    Very interesting, never heard about anchor links before.

  8. Sonny on Apr 3, 2010 said:

    I’ve never heard of anchor links – thanks for sharing. JCD usually comes up in the top rankings in quite a lot of Google searches actually..

  9. Aline on Apr 3, 2010 said:

    Jacob,

    Thank You very much for sharing this. Ive never heard of this before and will never look anchor tags quite the same! Cheers and keep up the good work!

  10. Ezequiel M. on Apr 3, 2010 said:

    I’ve never seen something like that, thanks for the info.

  11. Chris Lane on Apr 3, 2010 said:

    That is quite interesting, Jacob, thanks for sharing. I might have to consider doing that as well, though I had to look up your link on w3schools to fully understand it.
    Out of curiosity, I googled the same term and you came into 3rd & 4th place for me, and reverse of how you have it listed here. I wonder if it is because your search location is different than mine? At first I was thinking because you are Australia and I am America, but then I remembered you moved to NY. Interesting, nevertheless.

  12. Tin on Apr 4, 2010 said:

    Thanks for helpful tips. I have seen your website has a list of links under the main link in google. Can you tell us how to achieve that?

  13. natasha on Apr 6, 2010 said:

    thank you for sharing this….really appreciate that

  14. Jacob Cass on Apr 6, 2010 said:

    Chris,
    Yeah I’ve found that as well, back home in Australia my rankings were a bit lower in search results but when I moved to the States they were 1-2 higher. This may have something to do with the servers being hosted in the US as well as other variables such as local businesses.

    Tin,
    After your site has gained some credibility it adds the links there for you. There is no way to turn them on manually. Google controls it.

  15. Jonathan Butterworth on Apr 6, 2010 said:

    Very interesting and a good thing to know. May have to start testing anchor tags to see if they show in Google.

  16. Jayphen on Apr 8, 2010 said:

    Just so you know, you can link to any element on the page with an ID. You don’t need to use [a name=''] [/a] at all (in fact I would recommend not doing so – you shouldn’t be creating elements purely for functional purposes).

  17. Paul on Apr 20, 2010 said:

    How do you create anchor tags? I would be interested in doing this for my graphic design website

  18. Jacob Cass on Apr 21, 2010 said:

    Paul,
    Follow the link in the anchor tag article linked above, it will teach you how to do the anchor tags.

  19. 5-Squared on May 26, 2010 said:

    Thanks a lot for sharing. Very helpful tip.

  20. Kay on Aug 24, 2010 said:

    Hi JC, is this still a working thing?
    Seems like Google was experimenting and – at least here in Germany – i can not find your page(s) in top positions any longer, though they’re on the first page yet.

    Looks like this was valuable half a year ago but seems to be irrelevant now.

    Yet, i think it might not be too bad to use ‘name’d anchor tags anyway.

    Suggestions or ideas anyone?

  21. Shavit Tzuriel on Aug 24, 2010 said:

    @JacobCass:
    The geo location of your servers do matters for the search results.

  22. Jacob Cass on Aug 24, 2010 said:

    Hi Kay,
    I just checked and it seems you are correct! It seems to have phased out… and my search results are no longer at the top.

  23. Kay on Aug 24, 2010 said:

    I’ll keep on reading blogposts and tweets though ;)


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