Use of href=# or href=hash

[CeeBee-304918]

I use links with href="#" to trigger ajax functions in order to filter/sort and refresh  search results on page. Since several other html tags could potentially be used to bind a javascript event, (ie. span, img, div, etc), could there be a compelling reason to avoid using the anchor tag for this purpose? My concern is link juice dilution since many different pages will have the same links to: Sort by number of bedrooms or Filter by neighborhood. It is also common practice to use links with href="#" to submit ajax forms which are not html forms at all. I am just trying to rethink this practice and implement a best practice method. Thx

[Marcus_Miller]

Okay, right you are then, just trying to help buddy.

As far as I am aware there is no compelling reason to not use the href='#' tag and this will not be diluting link juice anywhere as # is not a page.

Marcus

[CeeBee-304918]

Marcus, I am using the ajax to serve "variable" content to human users only after the page has loaded and user has taken some action to sort or filter, and I specifically do not want that content indexed.  BTW, regarding Google indexing ajax content, I am not a fan of using G's proprietary hashbang methodology. If you want the content indexed, then load it with the page. Any content loaded through ajax should be for human consumption only. So, back to the question, about link juice...

Thx

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, don't take this as gospel, but I believe that Google does not index named anchors so when it looks at a URL it stops at #. So, links using # would not be indexed.

The whole ajax thing is quite interesting as if the page can have different content based on data driven ajax functionality then surely you are missing out on indexing a lot of your content.

I have not done any such experiments with ajax and indexation in this way but there is an interesting moz post on this here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content