Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Empty href damages SEO? (href="#")
-
Hello,
I'm analyzing a website with thousands of pages.
I realized that on many of them they have empty links such href="#".I wonder if that will cause any SEO damage, or if Google will just ignore it as there isn't any link?
I was reading about it and people seems to not be sure, although they recommend on forums to user the CSS pointer clickable instead of empty link.
Let me know your opinion on this please!
Thank you in advance!
-
Thank you for the insight. I agree with your insight. You are correct in saying that it will affect signals because there is no link. And also not an SEO issue.
-
The only reason to use a fragment (the hashtag part of a URL is called a fragment) as your anchor, is that you're adding that link solely for the purpose of tying it to a DOM event (like an onclick event). There's better ways to do this in modern web programming, but it's still possible to see some old school sites doing
By definition, fragments exist solely for the client. Your web server will not log them. Google Analytics does not natively track them. So clicking on an empty fragment like that will just take you back to the top of your page (provided the JS doesn't stop the event). There's nothing to track. But there's something interesting to note here
Google can actually do some basic JS and it will recognize this bad attempt at link obfuscation as an actual link. So if you have links similar to this (which is not recommended) then those links will be counted as links. Be aware of this if you're worried about backlinks.
-
I think you need to take a look at the page and how these have been used because it sounds like you haven't understood what the actual problem is fully.
With regards to relevance, it will probably give search engines signals that this page is no longer relevant and therefore affecting the frequency of the crawl for that domain/subdomain/page
It won't do that because they aren't complete links.
This is basically a means to an end. It serves a purpose and while there are better options to achieve what they want, this is certainly not an SEO issue.
-Andy
-
In my opinion, pertaining to your case of "empty links", does it affect SEO? The answer probably lies in the amount of it. Maybe there is no direct impact if there is maybe 1 or 2 or even 10 links. In summary, yes it does affect SEO in the sense of it is not able to pass the juice. Think about a nice or highly searched keyword in an article - [Some nice keywords] and this anchor text does not go anywhere. The link equity probably gets passed no where and probably limited to that page only. With regards to relevance, it will probably give search engines signals that this page is no longer relevant and therefore affecting the frequency of the crawl for that domain/subdomain/page. Indirectly and overtime, this will affect SERP for that domain.
As far as how many empty href wills start affecting SEO? It will be interesting to see this experiment. Any takers? I'll leave this to the SEO heavy weights or SEO nerds.
Correction: I agree to Andy's comment below.
-
Something i'd never thought about: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/anchor-links.html
So looks to not have an impact according to that article.
-
It looks like it's been done to activate certain functions, but it might have been a bit of a lazy way to do it.
However, because of the fact that they are a null link but they might show a description or more information, I can't see that this would ever cause issues to SEO.
Have you noticed that there has been any drop in positions that make you feel like they could be causing problems?
-Andy
-
Hey,
Well they are the maybe because some bug importing, and there are thousands of them like that.
We do not need that for any reason. Problem is that I will just request a change in case of being bad for SEO, otherwise it can be expensive to have someone spending days on that just because...https://www.prozis.com/pt/pt/xcore/xtreme-l-carnitine-3000mg-20-vials
If you go almost to the footer, you will see on bold this heading - under that you have some bulletins with the # link that I referred:
Principais Benefícios de Xtreme L-Carnitine 3000
-
Hi,
Is there a reason they are there? Do they serve any purpose at all?
I would be surprised if Google did anything with them and would probably just see it as a bit of spurious code. Are you able to share an example?
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does embedded content (from my site) help seo
hi i am creating a new accommodation site and will have some great videos on it (fly bys of local beaches and virtual tours of hotels etc). from an seo perspective i have two questions: 1. should i host on my own site or youtube/vimeo - its a new site but in the long run i want my site to get the credit 2. i will be giving the hotels the chance to embed and video content i have on their own sites. does this help my own seo juice and if so is there a particular way it should be done. there will be around 90 well established local hotels in total so figured it should add up.
Link Building | | neilhenderson0 -
Best SEO practice to redirect affiliate link
Hello, I got an affiliate program on my website, that redirects the affiliate link to the main site like: site.com/ads/aff_code/ -> site.com/ (The redirect is done using a 301 status code.) On the redirect process the site stores a cookie to track the affiliate sale. Will Google and others SE follow this permanent redirect, transferring the relevance of this affiliate link to my main site? In other words, if an affiliate does something wrong (like spams), does the bad reputation will be transferred to my main site? Is there a better way to do that from a SEO standpoint? Thanks,
Link Building | | darkmediagroup0 -
Is commenting on other peoples blogs / articles good for seo?
Hello everyone, Just a quick question, say if I find some websites which are relevant to my service and they have articles I can comment on and include my URL , will these help for SEO? The websites also have a good PR rating higher than 3 does this count towards anything? Would these links be classed 'follow' or 'nofollow' links - could something please explain what this means aswell. Thanks very much!
Link Building | | vanplus0 -
Listly and SEO
We use listly quite a lot. A few of our lists get embedded in other sites. A lot of the embedded lists have links back to us. Is there any seo benefit on this, or will just one of the sites count ? Isn't this just duplicate content ? Wondering what your thoughts are.
Link Building | | MarkQJones0 -
Seo & Real Estate Site?
I am a Realtor. I am also a web developer. I want to make a site about real estate and web development. Primarily how I use my unique skills with web to sell homes. A real estate website caps it's Page Rank very low. There are not a lot of good backlinks to get when compared to the web development industry. There are millions of blogs I participate in about web development/seo. There are a lot of blogs I participate in about real estate too; however, the real estate websites all have low page ranks. This is obviously because the seo/web development industries know how to build page rank, which makes it easier to accumulate it. It's difficult finding good outlets to get link power from in real estate. How confused would google be? Is there an acceptable strategy to making this a reality? Please point out all of the variables I am not seeing. Pros and Cons. I'm not an SEO pro. I would be going for the keyword Pensacola Real Estate. I would accumulate backlinks from the real estate industry and the web design industry. Help 🙂
Link Building | | JML11790 -
Does the ratio of external nofollow links to external "do follow" links matter in terms of SERPs ranking?
My site has an external link nofollow:dofollow ratio of approximately 1:1 That is, there are about as many nofollow external links as "do follow" external links. I have an impression that the ratio of no-follow to "do follow" links is a factor in the way that our website shows up in SERPs. I have the impression from reading a variety of sources, and from looking at Seomoz, that calculate "trust" factors as if they mattered (in SERPs), that seem to value a relatively low nofollow:dofollow ratio. Am I correct about that? Thanks,
Link Building | | tcolling
Tim PS - I don't know whether or not this matters, but our website is at: www.trustworthycare.com - Tim0 -
Are backlinks from sites like diigo useful for SEO?
I read an SEO article that recommended getting backlinks from social bookmarking sites like diggo.com. Does anyone have any thoughts on the usefulness of these types of links?
Link Building | | casper4340 -
SEO Triage - What matters most?
If you only had 8 hours to work on an SEO project... How would you spend your time to get the fastest results? On-page optimization, or link-building? Context: On-Page Optimization: "A" grade (SEOMOZ On-Page Report Card) Keywords: "moderately competitive" (SEOMOZ Keyword Difficulty Tool) Domain Authority: 33 (SEOMOZ Competitive Link Analysis)
Link Building | | JessicaCox0