Google “Jump To” Links Within Search Snippets

Sep 25, 2009 at 4:05pm ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Blog announced two new features within the Google search results we have spotted earlier. The first are the anchor based links and the second are the snippet based links. Google Testing Enhanced Listings, “Pagelinks” article from back in December 2008, told us this was coming as well. Here are pictures of both, that clearly describe each:

Anchor Based Jump To Links or Sitelinks:

Snippet Based Jump To or Sitelinks:

Both these types of links take you to the same page of the main link, but they anchor you down or jump you to a specific point on the page. This is done using anchor links within the page source. The Google Webmaster Central Blog explains how webmasters can help gain these links in their snippets. Google explains:

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 (i.e., 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.

As a side note, Google has also been testing what I am calling “deep sitelinks.” This is a combination of date and post data with Google Sitelinks in one snippet.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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