Can a search engine link to a certain section of an HTML file?

Question

If I have a page divided in sections/fragments, that are linked to within the page with anchors, like this:

<div class="menu">
    <a href="#sec1">Section 1</a>
    <a href="#sec2">Section 2</a>
    <a href="#sec3">Section 3</a>
</div>

<div class="content">
    <a name="#sec1"></a>
    <h2>Section 1</h2>
    <p>Bla bla bla...</p>
</div>

... can search engines like Google find those relationships and present them as hashed links in the search results, like this?

http://www.somepage.com/somefile.html#sec1

The reason I ask is because I find document fragments convenient for unobtrusive tabbed layouts in HTML. But the user must be able to find the content of a specific tab quickly via search engines.

Thank you /J

Answer 1

Google does not link to hash tags in general but there are a few useful tidbits you can do with hash links nonetheless. Here is a link to an authoritative article on the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

Answer 2

I can't think of any reason why search engines shouldn't be able to do this. The question is: why should they do this? To add a hashed link to the list of search results, the search engine must judge the target of the hashed link to be more important than the whole page. If the h2 in your example is more relevant to the query than the title of the whole page, the search engine could decide to display the hashed link and the named subheading.

I have never seen any such search result.