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
-
My site is linked from over 900 "The Globe"-domains - disavow or not?
Hi! As some of you may be familiar with, there is a giant spam-network with the same design and same page title on all domains: "The Globe - The world's most visited web pages". For example: theglobe.at
Link Building | | Sindre
theglobe.co.za
www.internet-search.us I've now discovered that over 900 of these spam-domains link to my site. My plan was of course to disavow them all, but Google is explicit on telling me to be careful. «Only disavow if you are certain that the links are damaging to your rankings». And to be honest, I'm not sure. Also: it seems drastic to disavow almost a thousand pages. I'm afraid to mess something up. What would you do?3 -
Do links from such sites as TripAdvisor give any weight or support for SEO
And what about other sites like quora or other niche forums/blogs where one might leave answers, with a link to their profile, which has a link back to the owner's website? _Cindy
Link Building | | cceebar1 -
Best Backlink checker - OSE or Hrefs?
Hi Guys I am looking for a new back link tool but i'm not sure which one to go for. Should I continue using Open Site Explorer or should I go for something else like Ahrefs.com or something else?
Link Building | | AndersDK0 -
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 -
Do inbound links to download .exe files improve SEO?
The site, (http://www.bartenderbarcodesoftware.com/) sells barcode software. They also provide free printer drivers on their site. During a recent domain change (before I started helping them), they began looking at their inbound links and found quite a few external sites linking to these download files. However, when someone clicks on the link on one of these sites (i.e. http://vvs-motor.com.ua/barcode-printer-drivers) it immediately begins downloading the file (i.e. http://www.seagullscientific.com/downloads/drivers/archive/7.2/7.2.4/Unimark_7.2.4.exe) without taking the visitor to the site. The owner would greatly prefer this traffic to engage with the site and is considering 301 redirecting those download links to an actual webpage. Question: Would this look suspicious to Google? Would this have a positive or negative effect on SEO? The last factor to consider is that many of these sites will likely just recreate the list based on the new links at some future point. Thanks for any help!
Link Building | | motosantiago0 -
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 -
Warrior Forum, Is it good for seo?
The Warrior Forum just changed there membership from free to paid. They have do follow attributes but I was wondering what peoples take is on joining them for both learning and seo purposes?
Link Building | | bronxpad0