Google Jump To Links in Snippets

It seems that along with consistently displaying sites' breadcrumbs in place of URLs within SERP snippets, Google's decided to give users another advancement in their "rich snippets." The ultimate ease in search engine use: they're also now increasingly showing 'jump to' links within the snippet, allowing visitors to 'jump' from the search results page right to the most relevant information (for them) on the listed web page.

For those not quite up-to-speed, a 'jump to' link is a link on a page which allows a web visitor to literally jump - normally down the page - to a different section within the content. Learn more about the HTML coding for 'jump to' links at the bottom of this post. Hop to it*.

I first noticed this while performing a search for "product liability law firm." It was a confusing finding at first, since this FindLaw Firmsite isn't functioning and I couldn't tell what I was looking at:

I started searching other topics and was able to find other examples across the web:

In looking for further examples, I ran across an interesting discrepancy...this screen shot (below) is interesting in that both these results look like one-line sitelinks. In the first result, the sitelinks are actually jump links within Wikipedia. So, it seems 'jump to' links can actually be presented as one-line sitelinks:

The point here is to show the difference between the relatively new (late September 2009) jump links included within snippets as compared to the older (~April '09) sitelinks addition.

Yet another way Google's working to improve their users' SERP experience via rich snippets.


Jump Link Coding
The HTML coding for 'jump to' links is two-part: one part coding for the actual content to which a jump link is pointing (a 'named anchor') and one part coding for the link itself.

So to name an anchor, you'd code it as: <a name="label">Anchor Text</a>
Then to name the link to the anchor: <a href="#label">Anchor Text</a>

* In a post about jump links, you'd think I'd have actually given a live example within this post. Well, I would've, except Blogger - according to the help forum - can't handle that type of link right now. See, they're undergoing their own enhancements, but evidently not as successfully as Google proper. Once the bug is fixed, I'll update this post to contain a working jump link...sigh.