Anchoring Your Pages in the Google Pond

After th definitive announcement the other day by Google that their search spiders and bots take no notice of  Metatags, Google has also given us a new way to create more page ranking and get more click-thru’s from our organic Google listings.

Page Anchors! Yes, page anchors. You know those links that take you from one piece of information to another on the same page. Those cute little links that save you from having to scroll through lines and lines of information on a page to find what you want, often used on FAQ pages and other pages with lots of information.

This is what was announced on the Google blog a couple of days ago:

“For most search results, Google shows you a few lines of text to give you an idea of what the page is about — we call this a “search snippet.” Recently, we’ve enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page.

Normally, a search snippet shows how a page, as a whole, relates to a your query by excerpting content that appears near and around where your query terms show on the page. But what if only one section of the page is relevant to your search?

That’s where these new features can help, by providing links within the snippet to relevant sections of the page, making it faster and easier to find what you’re looking for. Imagine, for example, that we’re researching trans fats and cholesterol, and their effects on the body. If we start with a generic query like [trans fats], Google returns several results with lots of information about trans fats in general, including this result from Wikipedia:

Google Search Results using Page Anchors

Now, included with the snippet are links to specific sections within the page, covering different subtopics of trans fats. Since we’re particularly interested in what’s healthy and what’s not, “Nutritional guidelines” is probably where the most relevant information is. Clicking this link will take you directly to that section, midway down the page.

Now imagine we’re particularly interested in learning about good cholesterol and what levels of it are healthy, so we try a more specific query, [good cholesterol level]. The top result is from the American Heart Association and has tons of information about cholesterol levels. The specific information about good (HDL) cholesterol, however, is contained in one section titled “Your HDL (good) cholesterol level”‎. Since the query was more specific, the snippet for this result now provides the option to “jump to” just this section of the website.

Clicking on “Jump to Your HDL (good) cholesterol level‎” takes you directly to the most relevant information on the page:

Clicking on the title of the snippet (”What Your Cholesterol Levels Mean”) still takes you to the top of the page, as always.”

and

“We just announced a couple of new features on the Official Google Blog that enable users to get to the information they want faster. Both features provide additional links in the result block, which allow users to jump directly to parts of a larger page. This is useful when a user has a specific interest in mind that is almost entirely covered in a single section of a page. Now they can navigate directly to the relevant section instead of scrolling through the page looking for their information.

We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.”

This information is invaluable to anyone configuring SEO on their site, it just goes to show how important it is to keep an eye on and update your SEO every couple of months.

Now go take a look at your site, which pages do you have that you could use Page Anchors on, if none could you create some FAQ’s or some content pages just to take advantage of the latest Google update?

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• Anchors Away! Google Now Has Search Results Within Search Results (techcrunch.com)
• Jump to the Relevant Section of a Google Search Result (googlesystem.blogspot.com)

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