I just found something weird I can't explain, so maybe you guys can help me out.
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I just found something weird I can't explain, so maybe you guys can help me out.
In Google http://www.google.nl/#hl=nl&q=internet. The number 3 result is a big telecom provider in the Netherland called Ziggo. The ranking URL is https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/. However if you click on it you'll be directed to https://www.ziggo.nl/#producten/internet/
HttpFox in FF however is not showing any redirects. Just a 200 status code.
The URL https://www.ziggo.nl/#producten/internet/ contains a hash, so the canonical URL should be https://www.ziggo.nl/. I can understand that. But why is Google showing the title and description of https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/, when the canonical URL clearly is https://www.ziggo.nl/?
Can anyone confirm my guess that Google is using the bulk SEO value (link juice/authority) of the homepage at https://www.ziggo.nl/ because of the hash, but it's using the relevant content of https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/ resulting in a top position for the keyword "internet".
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The site you've pointed to uses ajax to load its content. When the page loads there's a javascript snippet which takes over and adds the # to the page (hence why you're not seeing it as a httpd header). If you click on any other link you'll see that the base URL stays the same with some extra parameters on the end.
There are potential crawling issues with this and a number of fixes (some Google documentation here, although this isn't the fix that the site in question is using: http://code.google.com/intl/en-US/web/ajaxcrawling/).
So, in short, there's nothing fishy going on - it's just good old ajax content loading
- Matt
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This is actually a fairly crude attempt of loading AJAX content. I say 'crude' because it's not quite using Google's documented AJAX protocol using the hashbang (#!). There was an SEOmoz post about Google's protocol a while back that had some good examples:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content
For this specific website, there actually is a JavaScript redirect involved. The original URL will load, then some JS will do some work and eventually do a document.location.replace() to do the redirect to the URL with the hash. As far as GoogleBot is concerned it won't necessarily do the redirect and will index the original page.
One thing I want to caution is to again remember that this site is not exactly adhering to Google's recommendations on AJAX content. Coupled with the fact that there is a JS redirect going on I would say that there might be a risk of cloaking. On the front end, the content looks the same and I would kinda hope that Google would just treat this scenario similar to their hashbang solution because this site is not intending to do some tricky stuff here. But we can't trust that Google will always give a free pass.
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This looks more like a dynamic site using AJAX, rather than anchors in the page like you're thinking.
See: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html
No funny stuff. The page you see is the page google intended to show you, with all the SEO value for the page itself being responsible for its spot in the SERPs.
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