Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
-
Hi Moz,
Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading!
- We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com.
- We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs.
- These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york
- We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2.
- The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1
- The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank.
- Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
-
The solution I came up with was:
- Create a list of all the source URLs you have, and all the destination URLs you want
- Create all the destination URL pages
- Work out what the Ugly versions of all hashbang (pretty) URLs should be and record them (ref: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/specification)
- Implement 301 Redirects for the Ugly URLs
- Deploy a Sitemap with Pretty URLs
- Submit Your Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
- Wait for Google to re-index all your pages
- Check that the new URL(s) show up in Google search results too
- Clean up – Remove the pretty URLs from the sitemap
Job done!
I created a detailed page on this with examples on my blog at www.thedriversgarage.com/web-technology/redirecting-hashbang-urls-wix-urls/
Disclaimer - Make your own enquiries and do your own tests. I'm a pragmatist, I really don't care if this complies to standards. It worked for me and that's all I cared about. Google, etc. may process this stuff differently in the future. Do your own tests.
-
I would like to point out that twitter is using javascript redirects not serverside redirects. If you disable javascript and try that url it will load the homepage/ your twitter feed and the url will stay the same.
The second url doesn't seem to be properly redirecting as at least for me it just 301 redirects back to itself.
-
That's not true. Google is able to crawl and index properly setup ajax based pages like the one in question. Bing on the otherhand is not able to do so or at least not last time I checked.
-
That will teach me to skim read

Perhaps trying a different 301 plugin will help? Alternatively, you can pretty much redirect anything from within .htaccess.
This page on Webmaster World might be worth reading.
-Andy
-
Thanks for the responses!
@Kevin: Our main concern here is getting back that lost page rank, since javascript redirects don't pass page rank. We used http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ and _SEO Tools for Excel _to check whether the hashbang URL examples were using 301 redirects.
The correct URLs are
http://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey
http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles/#!Saddles@iNetSEO
These pages were indexed by Google before somehow, I suspect using escaped_fragment? the hashbang URLs would show up in search results
-
With the JavaScript option, people who bookmarked the page will get redirected.
-
The hash tag means that the page wont be indexed by Google and therefore, carry no page rank. It is like it is invisible. Just launch the new pages because Google will have never seen the current ones.
-Andy
-
I may be wrong, but I don't believe you can do this via a 301 redirect. How did you know the examples used a 301 redirect? The examples provided may have used JavaScript to do it (may not be the best, but can't think of any other option).
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
-
Is domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?
Hi everyone, Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B. The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website. If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags? I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow. Do you follow? 🙂 Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team. Thanks, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jgoehring-troy0 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Does Google Index URLs that are always 302 redirected
Hello community Due to the architecture of our site, we have a bunch of URLs that are 302 redirected to the same URL plus a query string appended to it. For example: www.example.com/hello.html is 302 redirected to www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc The www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc page also has a link canonical tag to www.example.com/hello.html In the above example, can www.example.com/hello.html every be Indexed, by google as I assume the googlebot will always be redirected to www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc and will never see www.example.com/hello.html ? Thanks in advance for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommRulz0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
Is 301 redirect suggested on pagination pages
Hi - Due to pagination the default page of site is coming in 2 url with - ?page=1/ sub-url and /sub-url is 301 a recommended solution due to this pagination urls Also - is it required to create separate title and meta description of every pagination page We are taking specifically in context of our discounts and offer section http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_offers&view=list&Itemid=9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Best way to merge 2 ecommerce sites
Our Client owns two ecommerce websites. Website A sells 20 related brands. Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google. Website B was purchased from a competitor. It has 1 brand (also sold on site A). Search results are normally high on the first page of google. Client wants to consider merging the two sites. We are looking at options. Option 1: Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A. Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A Option 4: ??? Any thoughts on this would be great. We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EugeneF0