Anchors incorporated into Google SEO

Anchors - page elements that allow webmasters to link to a specific part of an HTML document - could now have an impact on SEO for websites targeting their Google search ranking.

That is because Google is now using anchors to link directly to parts of a page in its search results.

For users of the search engine, this means search result 'snippets' - the part of a site that is shown alongside the page title in search results - could now be accompanied by links directly to the part of the page where the snippet text is placed.

Chris Kern, a member of Google's snippets team, writes on the Official Google Blog that clicking on the main title of the search result will still take users to the top of the page.

However, clicking on one of the named anchors will direct them to the relevant part of the page.

Fellow snippets team member Raj Krishnan adds on the Google Webmaster Central Blog that naming anchors using descriptive terms is a good way to increase their chances of appearing in results.

Webmasters who adapt their SEO to changes in Google's search results could welcome the move as an extra chance to optimise particular parts of their content for given search queries.

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