#hashtag Anchor text within content

[SeoSheikh]

Hi, i have a question about anchor text within my sites content.

It 'jumps' to content displayed further down the page via a side navigation at the top. These links don't take you away to any other page, instead take you further down the page to the relavent content.

My question is this: I've noticed in the URL that the anchor text - #jumpnavlink is placed at the end of the pages URL like so..

www.mywebsite.com/example-page.php#jumpnavlink

Is this creating a problem for duplicate content?
Is it creating a new URL for viewers to use?
Is it ok to have lots of these running throughout my sites content pages?

Many thanks for any light that is shed on this one!

Cheers
Alex

[grasshopper]

Hi Alex,

Matt is absolutely right - engines ignore everything to the right of the hash (properly called a "named anchor" or "URL fragment").

They ignore fragments for the reason you just described.  Fragments have traditionally been used in web design to build "table of contents" navigation that drops a user down the page to a specific position on the page, whether a different section, or a specific user's comment, etc.  If a page has 10 sections with 10 corresponding fragments, obviously the engine just wants to index the root URL, rather than waste time and money indexing all the fragments, which would be duplicates of the root URL.

Fragments can be very useful for visitors who want to link to a specific part of a long article, or directly to a comment they made.

There is no problem whatsoever with using lots of fragments for in-page navigation.

[Debdulal]

yup .. search engine will see it as single page -

www.mywebsite.com/example-page.php

_Now, if you numerous pages with hash tags that means, you are cramming loads of content in the same page that is www.mywebsite.com/example-page.php. This may be bad for the users but SEO's perspective this URLs bad, really bad.

To target different pages, you need to have URLs without the hash tag. _

[Matt-Williamson]

As far as I am aware Google doesn't index urls with a hashtag as this is pointing to an internal part of the page - essentially it will only index the url without the hashtag, so it isn't creating a new URL. However to be certain of this I would stick a site: query with your url including the hashtag and see if it appears with the hashtag, if, as I expect it doesn't then you shouldn't have an issue with duplicate content under two urls. As far as them being ok in relation to your SEO efforts I don't see why there should be a negative impact as you are essentially making your site more user-friendly and pointing to a specific part of the page that is already indexed - your are not duplicating that part of the page by creating an internal anchor to that specific content.

Just for your confirmation I can tell you I have a page that uses an internal anchor (#) and when you do a site search in Google this page doesn't appear. When you search for it without the # it does...