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URLs With HashtagsJune 1, 2011 By Jill Whalen
 Hi Jill,I’m a bit of a nit-picker when it comes to tidy URLs and end up in endless debates with the development team of functionality over form! We start with a URL like this: www.example.com/hotels But one of the new pieces of functionality on our site means that the URL now looks like this (hashtag content added after the page is launched): www.example.com/hotels#ProductList Do you think the hashtag content affects the site's SEO or link building in any way now, or is it ignored by search engines, hence no duplicate content or indexing issues? So, aside from looking ugly to the user and potential linker, are there any downsides to this? Thanks in advance. Charlotte ++Jill's Response++ Hi Charlotte, Traditionally, the search engines ignore everything after the hashtag because it's usually content contained on the same page or URL. Therefore, those additional URLs should not get indexed (only the part before the hashtag should). I'd do a site:command at Google to make sure of this, however. Best, Jill Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings and an SEO Consultant in the Boston, MA area since 1995. Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen  If you learned from this article, be sure to sign up for the High Rankings Advisor SEO Newsletter so you can be the first to receive similar articles in the future! Post Comment  Marcos ALonso said: I´m with Erin. I Think this is still a tag to mark content inside a page, so it could damage SEO´s efforts. BUT due to HTML5, which works also with this hashtag, I think in the future this won´t be a problem Jill Whalen said: No, Marcos, it doesn't damage SEO efforts when you use it as an anchor to link to specific content within a page. Freddy said: Other benefit of the Hashtag solution is to avoid google indexing Affiliate URLs and/or campaign parameters By placing the Hashtag on your URL and a piece of JS on the client side you should be able to capture the information and avoid duplicate URLs in SE. Jaydon said: My developer says that in order for certain pages within our site to load quickly (using AJAX), he needs to use hashtags (ex www.xyz.com/#aaa). When I mentioned to him that this would have an adverse SEO effect, he proposed the idea of manually submitting these pages to Google via Webmaster Tools. Is this a sufficient fix to the problem? Also, if I type in the URL into my web browser without the URL, it does direct me to the correct page on my site (above ex: www.xyz.com/aaa) but he says the hashtag is needed when clicking on a link within the site that directs me to that page. Is this creating a duplicate content error by having multiple URL's (one with hashtag and one without) that ultimately lead to same page and content? Any other ideas/recommendations? Thanks in advance! Jill Whalen said: @Jaydon, no that's not sufficient. Google doesn't index URLs with the # so it doesn't matter how you submit them. Since people go to the right URL anyway and Google will only index the right URL (without the hashtag) you're fine. Add Your Comments |
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My company has had this issue due to AJAX URLs. We are working on setting up indexable AJAX.
More info: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content
Problem is, what do you do with canonical links? What URLs are in your sitemaps? WHat about Yahoo and Bing.
Sigh.