301 Redirect to Specific Anchor: Good or Bad Idea?

[Planet13]

Hi all;

Would like to consolidate a few pages on a local services website.

For instance, we would like to move the pricing information from the pricing.html page to be on the index page.

The pricing table on the index page would have a named anchor - most likely something creative like #pricing or something like that.

So is it a good idea to do a 301 redirect to that specific named anchor on the index page?

Or should we just do the 301 redirect to the index page without the named anchor?

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Don't know if this matters at all, but we will be keeping a LINK to pricing in the main navigation menu, but the link will point directly to the NEW location, namely, the #pricing named anchor on the index page.

Thanks in advance.

[sem4u]

As far as I am aware, Google still ignores anything after the # in a URL. I would just redirect back to the URL of the index page.

[lucy24]

Never mind Google: think of the humans. Yes, you can redirect to an anchor. In Apache you have to use the [NE] flag; don't know the IIS equivalent.

As far as I am aware, Google still ignores anything after the # in a URL.

Not unless they've recently changed behavior again. A few years ago, a lot of people were noticing that search-engine links might point to a local # anchor. The hunch was that they only did this if the anchor was attached to a significant navigational element such as an <h3>. Now that logs rarely give full Google referers, it's almost impossible to tell what information was sent to the browser. (Of course it was never visible in the GET request itself; you had to pore over the referer.)