Named Anchors in Google Snippets

Darren Franks - October 12, 2009

On September 25, Google announced a new feature on their official blog that allows users to “jump” to specific sections of a webpage directly from the “snippet” underneath the link in the search engine results pages. These “named anchors” work differently from the Google site links in that they allow for people to get to the part of the page that contains the actual information they want based on their search queries.

“Named Anchors” in search results snippet:
   

We can see from the example in the above screenshot, taken from Google’s experimental platform “Caffeine”, the named anchors helps the user get an even more relevant search experience in that the user can now skip the excess information on a page and get right to what they want.

In essence, the use of “named anchors” in the snippets will assist the user to find the specific information they are looking for much faster and encourage webmasters to create well constructed pages with proper sections with good sub-headers. If a webmaster focuses on utilizing keywords in H tags (any words wrapped in an “H Tag” is given more weight in search engines”) and making the page divided in a logical manner, they have the opportunity to improve inbound traffic as any snippet with a named anchor will more than likely inspire more people to go to their page.