Google starts showing anchor links on pages

Sometimes long pages need additional navigation and anchors get introduced. Google recently started pulling your table of contents to the search results.

As announced in the Official Google blog:

image

As you can see, the start of the Wikipedia article’s table of contents has been pulled in as the four links above the URI. It’s interesting how vaguely this has been described: The Google Webmaster Central Blog only prescribes that you need to add sensibly named anchors and create a TOC for them (i.e. the start of the page must contain links to the subsections).

When the webmaster has done her job properly, Google will algorithmically select whether to show the links in the search or not. How it does that is beyond my understanding – for example, I seem to be getting the links on the Silverlight article when I just google for “silverlight 3”, but not when I search for “site:en.wikipedia.org silverlight 3”, although exactly the same page is included in both the results.

Oh well, not like I had to grok it all :-)

September 29, 2009 В· Jouni Heikniemi В· One Comment
Tags: ,  В· Posted in: Web

One Response

  1. LenardG - October 1, 2009

    Google always "moves in mysterious ways" :)

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