Using named anchors to identify sections on your pages
Stay organized with collections
Save and categorize content based on your preferences.
Friday, September 25, 2009
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 (that is, 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.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["Google introduced new features that provide additional links within search results, allowing users to jump directly to specific sections of a webpage."],["These deep links are generated algorithmically based on page structure and are displayed when a section is highly relevant to a user's search query."],["Website owners can improve the chances of these links appearing on their pages by ensuring clear page structure with distinct sections, descriptive anchor names, and a table of contents."]]],[]]
