Be careful of hashes in your URLs

Be careful of hashes in your URLs

Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Google ignores any text beyond a hash mark (#) in a URL. If you are generating URLs known as hash or fragment URLs, they will not crawl, index, or rank them. Google will also not flow PageRank to URLs with a hash, and instead, flow the PageRank to the root part of the URL that does not have the hash.

Now, if you’re using hash URLs for some sort of navigation and still have the content on the page (though not visible until a user clicks on the link that generates the hash URL), this will probably also not rank. Google has said that to rank in search for a topic; you need to have the content about that topic visible on the page when a user clicks.

Additionally, long pages with content that is not tightly written around a topic generally do not rank.

You CAN use hashes on the page as bookmarks – linking a user from a TOC at the top of the page to a visible set of content lower on the page – a link called an anchor. Often those anchors are also subheaders. If you link to those anchors, Google will still not transfer PageRank. However, since the text is visible on the page to the user, Google will often rank these headers in search in what the search community calls “Fraggles,” and Google will send the user directly to this header deep within a page. But these anchors don’t generate a new page and are not powered by JavaScript

There you have it – the overview on hashes in URLs and why you need to be careful and strategic about how you use them on your pages.

Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Listen to the previous episode: Why schema and how to get it implemented

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