Search engines (like Google and Bing) allow web searchers to click directly to a section of a web page. If the answer to a user's specific question is in the "career" section of a Wikipedia page, the user should be taken to that section...particularly on mobile where the sections are collapsed and it might be hard to scan for the answer. Our pages aren't optimized for this.
- On mobile, there is no "link" on the page to the sections headers.
- Apparently a #! makes it easier for google to consider section headers as unique urls
See here:
https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/anchor-links.html
From a recent SEO review of our site:
"The page anchor is not rendered properly inside the mobile browser. Using an ahref anchor may be a better option to take users directly to the content they are searching for. This would also improve mobile search by reducing taps and scrolling."
Related: T182069
Developer notes
Restoring the table of contents is trivial and there is not much of a performance trade off for doing so.
That said, it presents a huge design challenge as this screencast shows (table of contents can take up multiple scrolling screens pushing down content):
