Social plugin making URLs wonky, would this hinder SEO efforts?
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I have a client, heartlandplastic.com who uses a social SEO plugin which makes all of the URL's a bit wonky, for example, the homepage gets redirect to http://www.heartlandplastic.com/#sthash.Cyt22dM0.dpbs
Do you think I should find an alternative social share plugin, or that this plugin is fine, as is? They seem to be ranking fine for their immediate area.
Thank you!
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oh and just a note, no actual redirection is happening, the plugin is simply adding a query string to the end of the URL when the page loads.
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I don't believe so, or at least any effect should be minimal. a couple of links on the subject:
http://moz.com/community/q/link-building-does-query-string-matter
The general consensus seems to be that so long as you're using rel=canonical your fine.
Personally i would suggest removing the silly query string as I've said above, as if nothing else it doesn't look very nice for users. (in the past we've had clients say users are asking if they've been hacked etc.. as an example)
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Thanks Toby, do you think that this has any negative SEO value?
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The plugin is redirecting all traffic to that URL, whether the user actually decides to share the page or not.
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That looks like the ShareThis plugin's doing. Have a look at the issue thread here:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/code-being-added-to-the-end-of-my-urls
You or your developer needs to add
<code>doNotHash:true, doNotCopy:true, hashAddressBar:false</code>
To your site header.
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Do you mean the plugin is redirecting all the traffic to that horrible url? Or just redirect users after clicking to share? Or that url is the one the plugin shares?
damage change depending on the answer
but I would get rid of the plugin anyhow
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