Do descriptive over basic anchor links have any bearing on SEO?

Question

I have a page containing several different products, one after the other, each one on a separate line. Each product has a unique anchor in the form "pX", where X is the product ID (e.g. p123), so any given user can jump straight to the product on the page using my.domain/#p123.

Is this the best approach from an SEO perspective or should I be using a more descriptive anchor, such as #really-cool-product-name?

The alternative is to use my.domain/really-cool-product-name and then have the page scroll to that product on-load using JavaScript, but the former would be easier.

SEO is the key part here; I need to select the best method that will produce the best results and would appreciate any suggestions.

Answer 1

When is the last time you noticed a site being indexed with a 'HASH' within the URL, the answer is never. Google treats the hashes within a URL to be HASH Fragments and they do not use them to rank a site.

To get around this issue your pages should be accessible without the HASH fragments, a quick example of this looks like this:

• http://example.com/location#bournemouth <--- users
• http://example.com/location?bournemouth <--- bots
• http://example.com/website#seo <--- users
• http://example.com/website?seo <--- bots
• http://example.com/website#design <--- users
• http://example.com/website?design <--- bots

Also you could opt to use HASHBANG e.g

• http://www.example.com/#!design/ <--- users
• http://www.example.com/?_escaped_fragment_=design/ <--- Bots

The above code is just an example to give you an idea and you can think up your own structure.

Also SEF (Search Engine Friendly) Urls ain't really that friendly, Google and Bing put little weight into the actual algorithm, since its a 'content signal' that with a good page can be found elsewhere, they used to be given a lot more weight but since most sites use it, its hardly a factor. URLS should be made for your users, not search engines.