# 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
-
Added Schema and Rankings Went Down
Hello - We launched a schema plugin for our WordPress site to make our blog seen as articles and main page as an organization. The day after, we saw a dramatic decrease in Keyword rankings but our website health improved with Google. Any thoughts on what could be causing this?
Technical SEO | | Erin_IAN0 -
URL Structure
Hi, Hope you are all well. On our website we have a 'blog' and a 'news' section. The blog is located on "/blog" - but when you click on a post the url structure changes to /name-of-article and the blog subdomain isn't included. Would it be better to have "blog/name-of-article as this would then make the blog perform better in search results? Also, if our news page is under /news - but when you click on an article it changes to /news-article/name-of-article Wouldn't it be better to have /news/name-of-article Thanks a lot!! 🙂
Technical SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Single URL not indexed
Hi everyone! Some days ago, I noticed that one of our URLs (http://www.access.de/karriereplanung/webinare) is no longer in the Google index. We never had any form of penalty, link warning etc. Our traffic by Google is constantly growing every month. This single page does not have an external link pointing to it - only internal links. The page has been indexed all the time. The HTTP status code is 200, there is no noindex or something in the code. I submitted the URL on GWMT to let Google send it to the index. It was crawled successfully by Google, sent to the index 5 days ago - nothing happened, still not indexed. Do you have any suggestions why this page is no longer indexed? It is well linked internally and one click away from the home page. There is still the PR of 5 showing, I always thought that pages with PR are indexed.......
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
SEO url best practices
We're revamping our site architecture and making several services pages that are accessible from one overarching service page. An example would be as follows: Services Student Services Essay editing Essay revision Author Services Book editing Manuscript critique We'll also be putting breadcrumbs throughout the site for easy navigation, however, is it imperative that we build the URLs that deep? For example, could we simply have www.site.com/essay-editing rather than www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing? I prefer the simplicity of the former, but I feel the latter may be more "search robot friendly" and better for SEO. Any advice on this is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Kibin0 -
Keyword ranking not moving
Hello, We have a very important keyword for our website (www.decorplanet.com) that hasn't moved in any direction in over a year. The keyword is "bathroom vanities". Our current SEO company has told us that the previous company has "over- optimized/linked" for this particular keyword and now Google is penalizing us for this. They told us that we need to leave it alone for a while and concentrate on other keywords and this one should naturally come back up (I should mention that at some point, we were much higher than where we are right now for that particular keyword). Many of our other high-profile keywords have been moving nicely to the first page. Keywords like "modern bathroom vanities", "antique bathroom vanities", "contemporary bathroom vanities", but the one that we really want ("bathroom vanities") hasn't budged at all. Does anyone have any thoughts on this. Is it possible that Google put us in some sort of a "sand-box" - I mean we are on page 2 so it doesn't sound like that's the case. It's just very bizarre that we can't seem to do anything with this keyword. Really appreciate any thoughts or input on this.
Technical SEO | | steven11330 -
301 an old URL with a ? in the URL?
I am redoing a site and the URL's are changing structure. The client's site was in magento and in the store they would get two URLs, for example: /store/categoryname/productname and /store/categoryname/productname?SID=dslkajsfdoiu947598whouieht983hg98 Do I have to 301 redirect both of these URL's to their new counterpart? Both go to the same content but magento seemed to add these SIDs into the navigation and Google has both versions in the index.
Technical SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
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