# in url affecting rank
-
Hi
I am building links to a page www.companyname.com/category.index.php
There is also another similar url www.companyname.com/category.index.php#. This page is linked to from the non # page. This is a new client and I'm not entirely sure why that link is there.
Am I correct in thinking that these two urls are different in the eyes of the search engines?
If so, would some of the link juice to www.companyname.com/category.index.php
be transferred to
www.companyname.com/category.index.php#
and affect the ranking of the non # page?
I hope this makes sense!
Thanks
-
I had similar question, but I found this discussion so won’t send my questions as a new one.
My questions was that is it a SEO (link juice) problem when we did 301 redirects from http://www.example.com/folder to http://www.anotherdomain.com/folder/#rdr=oldsite
We added the hash / parameter to get stats how many visits do we get from the old site now and in the future, and with the help of hash in url we can get this information from our analytics tool.After reading Mike’s answer, I believe I found my answer and understand that this is not a problem, but if anyone have other comments then please respond. Thanks!
-
That's great Mike, thanks for your help.
I'm pretty confident it's not a duplicate page now, although we do need to link to the correct page, simply from a user experience point of view.
Cheers.
-
The hash or "#" is usually just referenced by the browser, not the server, so Google does no care about the use of a "#" at the end of your URL. In fact, you can go to pretty much any page and add "#" at the end and you will get the same page, because it is a browser reference.
Some web designers will also just put "#" as the URL as they are coding, because they do not know the final URL.
If you can pinpoint where this is happening, I would suggest fixing it, even if it is not impacting Google indexing or your SEO... just from a "good house keeping" point of view.
You would use the canonical tag if you wanted to keep both versions in place. If you only want to keep one version, you would 301 redirect, which come to think of it... I don't know if you can do, again because the hash is usually just reference by the browser and not the server.
Here is also a quick quote from John Mu (an engineer at Google), stating, "We generally ignore the "fragments" (as in http://domain.com/path#fragment) when crawling, indexing and ranking since this is generally just something that is handled on the client side."
If you provide the domain, I might be able to help you further.
Hope this info helps.
Mike
-
Many thanks for your answer danrawk.
I think the # has been left from when the website was being developed and was used as a placeholder for where the intended url should go.
I'm not seeing any duplicate content issues in Webmaster Tools. Would this mean Google doesn't see this as two different urls?
If it does see two different urls, I guess we will have to use canonical tag.
Thanks
-
the hash "#" is sometimes used as a link reference to a specific spot on a linked page
i.e. www.companyname.com/category.index.php#specificspot
do you have access to google webmaster tools? in there, you should see a section about duplicate content that google is seeing. that might be of some help to you.
if by chance the # is not used in the way mentioned above, and it's some weird content management system character to manage pages, you may want to implement canonical tagging so that when someone views
www.companyname.com/category.index.php#
the canonical reference is for :
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Adding a parameter to the URL / URL Stracture
Dear Community, I would like to ask a question regarding url structure. We are struggling with shorting urls and we thought to add a "parameter" to the url. Example: domain.com/product**/a/** or domain.com**/a/**product/ Current url structure: domain.com/product/ So we go after and short url contains "/a/" and find the category we want. Is this going to harm our SEO strategies? Any idea is welcome.
Technical SEO | | geofil0 -
How to delete specific url?
I just ran drawl diagnostics and trying to delete pages such as "oops that page can't be found" or "404 (not found_ error response pages. Can anyone help?
Technical SEO | | sawedding0 -
Keywords, when are you overdoing it in the URL?
Hi guys, I'm auditing a site covering compensation for cancer. Keywords could include: Undiagnosed cancer 20 cancer compensation 10 undiagnosed cancer symptoms 10 cancer misdiagnosis claims 20 cancer claims 10 misdiagnosis of cancer 50 cancer misdiagnosis 70 So, when structuring the URL for the category, this was previously selected: www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-misdiagnosis Although sub-pages appear like this: www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-misdiagnosis/breast-cancer-misdiagnosis-claim/ 'Cancer misdiagnosis' as a keyword attracts the most traffic, but if we're using it on sub-pages - is there a need to include it twice on all sub-page URLs? With that in mind, would it be better to follow the following format? www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-compensation www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-compensation/breast-cancer-misdiagnosis-claim/ Or is there a better way to structure this? Thanks in advance guys!
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Ranking going down and down and disappears.
I asked a question a few weeks ago about a main keyword that we are targeting that is fluctuating up and down. The keyword is "trash bags" and that is what my company sells. All different colors, thicknesses and sizes. This isn't just a random keyword we are trying to optimize for, this is our business. Before I started optimizing the website for "trash bags" we used the term "garbage bags", now that we started we have been off the charts and on the charts, but we have never regained rankings. The trend finally looked like it was going upwards... but now I see I dropped off of google again. Is this normal? Should I be worried that google is penalizing me for this keyword (There is many links that have trash bags in the anchor text - but we do sell that!)? Here is a screenshot of our ranking history for trash bags: https://www.diigo.com/item/image/3vpdp/no01
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd1 -
Shorter URLs
Hi Is there a real value in having the keywords in the URL structure? we could use the URL: Mybrand.com/software/tablets/ipad/supertrader.html Or instead have the CMS create the shorter version mybrand.com/supertrader.html and just optimize this page for the keyword 'supertrader ipad software'
Technical SEO | | FXDD1 -
URL rewriting causing problems
Hi I am having problems with my URL rewriting to create seo friendly / user friendly URL's. I hope you follow me as I try to explain what is happening... Since the creation of my rewrite rule I am getting lots of errors in my SEOMOZ report and Google WMT reports due to duplicate content, titles, description etc For example for a product detail, it takes the page and instead of a URL parameter it creates a user friendly url of mydomain.com/games-playstation-vita-psp/B0054QAS However in the google index there is also the following friendly URL which is the same page - which I would like to remove domain.com/games-playstation-vita/B0054QAS The key to the rewrite on the above URLs is the /B0054QAS appended at the end - this tells the script which product to load, the details preceeding this could be in effect rubbish i.e. domain.com/a-load-of-rubbish/B0054QAS and it would still bring back the same page as above. What is the best way of resolving the duplicate URLs that are currently in the google index which is causing problems The same issue is causing a quite serious a 5XX error on one of the generated URLs http://www.mydomain.com/retailersname/1 - , if I click on the link the link does work - it takes you to the retailers site, but again it is the number appended at the end that is the key - the retailersname is just there for user friendly search reasons How can I block this or remove it from the results? Hope you are still with me and can shed some light on these issues please. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)? Any other tips? EX: http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html OR http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html
Technical SEO | | JustinStupid0 -
URL Rewrite
Using the .htaccess file how do I rewrite a url from www.exampleurl.com/index.php?page=example to www.exampleurl.com/example removing index.php?page= Any help is muchly appreciated
Technical SEO | | CraigAddyman0