Test 358: Do #Anchor Links Pass Juice (Linking from the Same Page to Another Place on the Page)?

We do know linking to ourselves helps ranking, so let's see if creating an #anchor link in a page helps rank it.

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Do anchor links pass juice? Linking from the same page to another place on the page. That's what this hashtag anchor plus the anchor link the keyword when you use that and use that as a hypertext link on a page that is what that is. So, we know the background is we know that linking to ourselves and a fully qualified URL helps us rank. That will help the page rank just linking to yourself. So, I was like, okay, so maybe these anchor links might help. We decided to test it because it's a test you're linking to yourself. It's not a fully qualified link but you're still linking to yourself.

We set up three tests. All of them had lorem ipsum pages on the test sites. Test one, we put three anchor links on the middle page and then test two was the totally reverse. We put three anchor links on all the pages except the middle page and then test three we used all 10 pages to put the anchors on the page consecutively. If these do work and we see something we might know where the sweet spot is. We did this on three different ones. Test one, this is what they look like starting out. This is the test that has the three anchors on it and none of these do. This is the middle page, test 1. Test 2 has three anchor links on all these pages except for this page right here, has no anchors and test three is the consecutive and it's here and it starts out so we put one anchor, two anchor, three anchors, four anchors and so on. The results for test one, the page stayed in the exact same position. It was number one, two, three, four, five, down. It was five down from in the last test. That was in the middle the whole time, the whole month it stayed in the exact same position. So, when you see that, a test like that it's like, okay, so it does absolutely nothing. That's what I thought. Then, we get to test two which is the reverse. All these pages got three anchors except this one and remember it was down in the middle here so it rose up. If we had just done this test I would have thought, oh wow, so putting anchors on your site – at least three anchors could hurt your site. So, this is two conflicting things but this not moving and this saying that they liked, if you had to compare all these pages they like the one without the anchors. I’ll maybe say anchors might hurt you. Then, we came up with the consecutive stuff and this didn't really give me anything. These two changed and I was surprised it was the three that changed. Three and seven changed a lot but everything else it's felt like minestrone soup. They're all over the place. The analysis is this, that I feel like they could hurt you if anything. On the best note they won't do anything but on a serious note they may hurt you. It is interesting. Let's see here. Nine, five four tens up here it's weird. On this test, I’m very uncertain. I feel like -- it's like inconclusive. I don't know. If anybody out there wants to give me some feedback on this I would love to take it and then I’ll pass it back in our next video.