URL: Broken Bookmark

URLs that have a broken bookmark (also known as ‘named anchors’, ‘jump links’, and ‘skip links’) that link users to a specific part of a webpage using an ID attribute in the HTML and append a fragment (#) and the ID name to the URL.

When the link is clicked, the page will scroll to the location with the bookmark.

While these links can be excellent for users, it’s easy to make mistakes in the set-up, and they often become ‘broken’ over time as pages are updated and IDs are changed or removed.

A broken bookmark will mean the user is still taken to the correct page, but they won’t be directed to the intended section.

While Google will see these URLs as the same page (as it ignores anything from the #), they can use named anchors for ‘jump to’ links in their search results for the page ranking.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

This filter will only populate when ‘Crawl Fragment Identifiers’ is enabled via ‘Config > Spider > Advanced’.

View URLs with this issue in the URL tab and ‘Broken Bookmark’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Use the lower ‘Inlinks’ tab to view pages that link to them.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Find Broken Bookmarks‘.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when a URL has a broken bookmark/named anchor which fails to direct the user to the intended section of the webpage. For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/services/#brokenbookmark

How To Fix

Review the pages that link to the broken bookmarks by using the ‘Inlinks’ tab and ensure this has the correct ID attribute that’s used on the page for the relevant section.