New AddThis URL Sharing
-
So, AddThis just added a cool feature that attempts to track when people share URL's via cutting and pasting the address from the browser.
It appears to do so by adding a URL fragment on the end of the URL, hoping that the person sharing will cut and paste the entire thing. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me.
Unless I misunderstand, it seems like it will add a fragment to every URL (since it's trying to track all of 'em). Probably not a huge issue for the search engines when they crawl, as they'll, hopefully, discard the fragment, or discard the JS that appends the fragment.
But what about backlinks? Natural backlinks that someone might post to say, their blog, by doing exactly what AddThis is attempting to track - cutting and pasting the link.
What are people's thoughts on what will happen when this occurs, and the search engines crawl that link, fragment included?
-
Thanks, Ryan.
-
I am not sure why you received the malware alert. Here is a direct link to the video on viddler: http://www.viddler.com/explore/jpozadzides/videos/2/
I can share that I used TYNT. Every page of my content had a hash tag on it and I never saw a search result with a hashtag. I never saw any indication in GWMT that my site used hashtags.
Matt clearly says "Google takes a URL and truncates at the hashmark. If you have bla-bla-bla #3 and bla-bla-bla #4 those both get treated or canonicalized as the same URL"
-
Seems like Rand concurred back in 2009:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash
Useful stuff. About halfway down the comments on the above link Rand mentions needing specific analytics code to track things accurately. Anyone have experience with Google Analytics and # symbols?
By the way, Ryan, that link you posted is being flagged by Avast as containing malware. No idea if it's real or not.
-
I was just watching a Matt Cutts video from 2007. Yes, I know that would be considered the dark ages of SEO but I believe for this topic, the video has relevancy.
@22 minutes in Matt says when Google encounters a hashtag in a URL they truncate it.
http://onemansblog.com/2007/08/04/matt-cutts-lecture-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/
-
The hash tags do not appear in the SERPs.
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the response!
My interest isn't so much about visitors being able to follow the backlink or not, but how the SE's will index them. When a SE crawls a site with URL fragments, my experience has been that they do a good job discarding them.
What I'm seeing is two possibilities:
-
The SE's will discard the fragment when they crawl, and simply index the page as if it didn't have a fragment on the end, meaning a backlink with a fragment is identical to one without. Or,
-
They won't discard the fragment, and we'll end up with duplicates in the SERP's, which would, in part, be dealt with via a canonical tag.
It's great that you've used a similar service with TYNT.com Do you have any experience in how the SE's behave when crawling a link from TYNT and indexing that page?
Cheers.
-
-
This is nothing new to the web, just new to AddThis. TYNT.com offers this identical service. I have used them for some time but since I use AddThis for social sharing, it is more convenient for me to move this service to AddThis and eliminate one vendor.
The hashtag that is added to the end of URLs is there for tracking purposes. You can remove it or alter it, and you will still wind up on the exact same page. The hashtag has no effect on backlinks other then to track them.
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
-
Ranking Issue for New Site
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Conundrum with brand new website keywords...
I'm working with on a website for an app called BetterRX. There's a prescription card called BetterRX Card. Our domain is Better RX.com and the card is BetterRXCard.com. "Better RX" as a brand search is dominated by prescription discount cards, with Good RX being the most dominant. Any suggestions on how to go about mixing optimization for brand as well as the app?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sickle3110 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
URL Construction
Working on an old site that currently has category urls (that productively rank) like this example: LakeNameBoating.com/category/705687/rentals I want to enhance the existing mid page one rank for terms related to "Lake Name Boat Rentals," 301ing the old urls to the new, would you construct the new urls as: LakeNameBoating.com/lake-name-boat-rentals or... LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals And why? It's all for one particular lake with "name" being just an anonymous placeholder example. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
New site. How important is traffic for a new site? And what about domain age?
Hi guys. I've been building a new site because i've seen a real SEO opportunity out there. I'm a mixing professional by trade and so I wanted to take advantage of SEO to help gain more work. Here's the site: www.signalchainstudios.co.uk I'm curious about domain age. This site fairly well optimised for my keywords, and my site got pretty good content on it (i think so anyway). But it's no where to be seen on the SERP's (link at all). Is this just a domain age issue? I'd have though it might be in the top 50 because my site's services are not hard to rank for at all! Also what about traffic? Does Google want to see an 'active' site before it considers 'promoting' it up the ranks? Or are back links and good content the main factor in the equation? Thanks in advance. I love this community to bits 🙂 Isaac.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac6631 -
301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs
Hi I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors. I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail. The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result. If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help. Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seamoose0 -
URL or Domain length
Hi All, I am wondering if google still does give importance to the length of the domain or url. If yes then how much is the acceptable length of a domain and URL. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
How to 301 redirect all URLs with /? in?
I want to redirect all URLs that have /? in it. Indexed in Google is a bunch of urls lik: mysite.com/?674764 mysite.com/?rtf8y78 I want all these URLs to be redirected to my home page. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0