I have a sitemap that looks like: # A B C D etc where A is a link to a list of articles that start with A and # is a link to a list of articles that start with a number. All the pages linked from letters are indexed. None of the pages linked from # are indexed. Has anyone else seen this? If so are there other Characters that google doesn't follow? If so why? Regards
I've seen cases where Google ignores links that have anchor text of one character. It might be what you are seeing.
Also, especially if it is a larger site, it will probably not be crawled all of it at the same time. I would say be patient, in time google will probably follow the other links as well.
A search for # yields nothing. The character is a spacer in Google's eyes. Perhaps they think it's the same as a space thus hidden. Or they think; if the anchor text is nothing (a spacer) then there's nothing behind it. Make it a word of some sorts and see what they do.
Thanks all. It is not a question of patience (you will see from my monica I have plenty of that) - these links have been up for > 6 months on 100 sites and the sites get >150k visits per day from google (at one stage last month they got >750k visits per day from googlebot). Numbers and letters seem to always be indexed but # and » don't (on my sites anyway). I am pretty sure this is either a new phenomena or an anomoly in my case. I certainly would be interested in other examples if you have any.
Perhaps it is an attempt to stop Google bombing. Remeber that not too long ago people were getting ranked for stuff just by adding the ?keyword to the link. Some people started stuffing their # anchor tags with keywords to improve their rankings. Also, usually a link with an anchor is not unique (ie. www.domain.com and www.domain.com#anchor both point to the webpage www.domain.com) so perhaps that has something to do with it too.
I've got a similar structure with navigation links on a few sites, and never had any problem with G spidering, even the ones that have just one digit in the anchor text.
If you have multiple site maps, why not make each hit a keyword in its title? They do rank for something. I have 4 site maps that break up my site, and each one hits a different search term and they rank pretty well. So instead of A B C D E You could link to them with Cool Articles | Okay Articles | etc etc etc and make the title of the page the same. More pages = more potential keywords and thats a good thing.
It just seems strange to me in circumstances where: <a>#</a> doesn't count but: <div style="display:none"><a>link</a></div> does! if the search engines are going to do this why not put it in the guidelines. I see this phenomena consistently across 100 websites and though this may be confirmation enough I have learned to take nothing for granted. I would love to hear from anyonybody else who can confirm/refute that # and » are not followed by google.
A Google search for # returns no results so it appears that this is a character which Google does not index.
A search for » shows results but (on my websites at least) google appears not to be indexing pages where » is the link text. Anyone else agree this is the case? PS A search for >> returns no results.