How Does Google Treat External Links to URLs with # Anchors?

[SAMarketing]

Here are two URLs to explain this example:

• **Original URL: **example.com/1/
• **URL that points to anchor within the webpage above: **example.com/1/#anchor

1. Does Google treat these two URLs as separate entities or the same? For example, does an external link to the anchor URL pass full PageRank value to the original URL? How does Google handle this?
2. Is there anything negative about this situation? Are there any risks associated with links to the anchor URL?
3. Finally, is it more valuable for an external link to point to the URL without an anchor?

[SAMarketing]

Hi Kevin,

Thank you for your reply. I'm trying to understand how Google views URLs with # anchors as external links and how it passes value (i.e. PageRank), rather than how they index pages with # anchors. Sorry if that was unclear.

Do you have insight into this question?

[KevinBudzynski]

Google addresses it here.

[KevinBudzynski]

Good question. I may be mistaken on this, but I believe Google will index the page not the anchor on the page (since they are the same). I tried to enter this:

inurl:#

and no results came up. So I would guess that it drops the anchor no matter what and simply indexes the page.

Can anyone clarify this?