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It sounds like a stupid question, but I couldn't find an answer: Are too many empty anchor links bad for SEO? We have 4-6 empty anchor links per page that trigger actions like a contact popup form, Woocommerce tabs on a product page etc. The syntax is like: domain.com/# or domain.com/#do-something These links do NOT link to specific HTML content (like the good old back-to-top link). Our SEO expert does not like it, since his tools found too many internal links linking to the very same pages.

As a user I would say: So what? However, our expert is not happy with it. Do these links do any harm in terms of SEO? I'm pretty surprised that this seems still to be debatable in the year 2020.

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  • Yes, it is harmful for the SEO. Sometimes these methods are also called as “cloaking” where webmasters show content to users which are different than the search engine bots. In your case, bots can crawl to these URLs with empty anchor texts, but users won’t find it out. That’s exactly why Google or other search engines won’t like about your site. Ideally, you shouldn’t do it if your primary traffic channel is organic search.
    – Bhargav Joshi
    Jul 11, 2020 at 1:42
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    This is obviously not cloaking at all. We use tabs not for showing different content to bots or users, but to make the user experience better.
    – user2516117
    Aug 11, 2020 at 13:18
  • @BhargavJoshi If you have an answer then please post an "answer" so other users can pass judgement/vote. Comments are to seek clarification about the question only. You have posted an "answer" / strong opinion in a comment which seems to be entirely incorrect IMO, but the commenting system on SE does not allow this to be expressed.
    – MrWhite
    Jan 7, 2021 at 14:42

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Links are a way for Google to crawl the site and understand the site structure and pass the right signal. I don't see in your case that having too many links will cause any issues, even when these links are not to a specific HTML content, empty # used for JS this is fine and this is not something to worry about and will not make any difference.

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I would avoid using href="#do-something" links for SEO. They are supposed to link to sections of the page by id attribute or name attribute on an anchor tag. Googlebot does pay attention to named anchor fragment URLs like. Googlebot tries to pass PageRank to them and Google may show them in the search results in some cases. If you use six different named anchor links in your page that aren't actually meant to take users to specific content within the page it could really confuse Googlebot and throw off your SEO.

It is fine to use href="#" links for SEO. That link points back to the same page and does so without a named anchor. It is a very common idiom for a link powered by JavaScript that Googlebot is likely to understand. Furthermore, if you use 6 of the same link, Googlebot will ignore all but the first. Using 6 of those exact hrefs won't hurt your site any more than using one would.

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  • "I would avoid using href="#do-something" links for SEO." - Although the OP isn't specifically doing this for SEO? They are just used as anchor points for JS event listeners (to display content). Navigating to #do-something might also trigger the same response.
    – MrWhite
    Jan 7, 2021 at 14:49

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